Last Updated on August 11, 2021
Summary
kitty performs well. It’s stable in use, has fairly modest memory requirements, and offers hardware-acceleration. It’s targeted at power keyboard users with the ability to access all functionality without leaving the keyboard through tons of keyboard shortcuts. But there’s mouse support available offering the ability to open URLs, double click, triple click, right click, and more.
Does kitty supplant Alacritty as the best hardware-accelerated open source terminal emulator? Nearly but not quite. There’s lots to admire in kitty but it hasn’t (yet) become my go-to terminal emulator.
kitty is a cross-platform terminal emulator. It runs on Linux and MacOS. It should be possible to port it to other UNIX-like operating systems given its rendering is performed with OpenGL only.
Note, there’s a different project that sports the same name. Don’t be confused by KiTTY, a form of PuTTY. That’s a Windows-based telnet / SSH client. It’s always a bad idea for a software project to use the same name as an existing program.
Website: sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty
Support: FAQ, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Kovid Goyal and many contributors
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
kitty is written in Python and C. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary
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Well written review.
Some other points to consider …
“kitty can only use monospace fonts”
For actual doing work in a terminal (not just something to look pretty in a screenshot) why would anybody want other than a monospaced font?
Even In the simplest of cases, vis file listing (eg ls -aFl), columns of information would no longer line up.
Is the xterm on your memory usage graph with or without TeK window support which it has been claimed in the past causes xterm to be more of a memory hog?
And why not also include rxvt (original version not the same as unicode-rxvt urxvt) which always claimed in its manual page as being one of the most memory efficient of terminal emulators.
Also urxvt (unicode-rxvt) is not so bad for running multiple urxvt windows as would seem from the single instance because it comes with a urxvtd (daemon) with which multiple urxvtc (client) instances can be fired up.