Kitty

Kitty is the fast, feature-rich, cross-platform, GPU based terminal emulator. If you live in the terminal, the cost of a slow one is paid every hour, in dropped frames on heavy output and lag between a keystroke and a character. Kitty moves the drawing onto the GPU and keeps it off the input path.

The performance work has three parts. GPU and SIMD vector CPU instructions do the rendering, a separate thread keeps latency low, and the tradeoffs are configurable so you decide where the budget goes. Everything else is set in kitty.conf, which covers fonts, cursor, scrollback, mouse behavior, the bell, layouts, the tab bar, color schemes and key bindings.

The feature set reaches well past drawing text quickly.

• Graphics: images and animations through the terminal graphics protocol.
• Typography: ligatures, variable fonts and emoji with per-glyph font substitution.
• Window management: programmable tabs and splits, with Stack, Tall, Fat, Grid, Horizontal and Vertical layouts.
• Kittens: small extensions written in Python, including an SSH kitten that edits or downloads remote files inside an existing session.
• Remote control: a running instance driven from scripts or the shell, with startup sessions for a predefined working setup.

Kitty runs on Linux, macOS and the BSDs and is packaged across many distribution repositories. Hyperlinks take configurable actions, and a pager browses the entire history or the output from the last command. The project also authored the terminal graphics protocol and a keyboard handling specification for the wider ecosystem.