Kitty Terminal

Kitty is a fast, feature-rich, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that offloads text rendering to the GPU for maximum performance while providing advanced features not found in traditional terminals. Created by Kovid Goyal (also the author of Calibre ebook manager) and written in a combination of C and Python, Kitty has over 26,800 stars as of 2026. Unlike Alacritty which focuses on minimalism, Kitty includes a rich feature set while maintaining GPU-accelerated rendering performance. Key features include: built-in tabs and window splits (tiling layouts with configurable keyboard shortcuts, no need for tmux), image protocol support (displaying images inline in the terminal using the kitty graphics protocol, supporting PNG, JPEG, GIF animations, and arbitrary RGBA pixel data, used by tools like timg, viu, and ranger), Unicode 14+ support with 24-bit true color and undercurl/underdot/underdash underline styles, ligature support (configurable per font), remote control protocol (controlling kitty instances via IPC from scripts: opening windows, sending text, resizing layouts), layout management (stack, tall, fat, grid, horizontal, vertical, and custom layouts via Python plugins), Python-based configuration and scripting (the kitty config is Python, enabling dynamic configuration and custom keybindings with arbitrary Python code), copy-on-select and clipboard integration, font features (OpenType features, variable font support, font fallback chains), mouse support (clickable URLs, drag selection, mouse reporting for applications), startup sessions (predefined window layouts loaded on startup), and kitten utilities (built-in tools like icat for image display, diff for side-by-side file comparison, ssh for kitty-features over SSH, themes for color scheme management, transfer for file transfer). Licensed under GPL-3.0.