kitty for Mac
GPU-accelerated terminal emulator.
Free
In English
Version 0.47.0When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission
kitty overview
kitty is a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator.
Highlights:
- Offloads rendering to the GPU for lower system load and buttery smooth scrolling. Uses threaded rendering to minimize input latency
- Supports all modern terminal features: graphics (images), unicode, true-color, OpenType ligatures, mouse protocol, focus tracking, bracketed paste and several new terminal protocol extensions
- Supports tiling multiple terminal windows side by side in different layouts without needing to use an extra program like tmux
- Can be controlled from scripts or the shell prompt, even over SSH
- Has a framework for Kittens, small terminal programs that can be used to extend kitty's functionality. For example, they are used for Unicode input, Hints and Side-by-side diff
- Supports startup sessions which allow you to specify the window/tab layout, working directories and programs to run on startup
- Cross-platform: kitty works on Linux and macOS, but because it uses only OpenGL for rendering, it should be trivial to port to other Unix-like platforms
- Allows you to open the scrollback buffer in a separate window using arbitrary programs of your choice. This is useful for browsing the history comfortably in a pager or editor
- Has multiple copy/paste buffers, like vim
What's new in version 0.47.0
- A new Drag and drop kitten to allow drag and drop of files from your shell to any GUI program even across SSH (#9984)
- A new option palette_generate to automatically generate the 256 color palette from the first 16 colors (#9426)
- For builtin key mappings automatically fallback to matching the US-PC layout key when the pressed key has no matches and is a non-English character (#9671)
- Allow drag and drop of windows to re-arrange them, move them to another tab/OS Window or detach them into a new OS Window. See toggle_window_title_bars to temporarily show window title bars to drag them around (#9626)
- Have scroll_line_up and scroll_line_down smooth scroll by default. Can be restored to old behavior by re-mapping without the smooth argument (#9689)
- Draw a progress bar at the top of the window when a program reports progress using the OSC 9;4 escape sequence, controlled by progress_bar (#9777)
- Automatically reload configuration on changes, controlled by auto_reload_config
- Allow specifying multiple background images for background_image that are stored on GPU to allow fast image switching (#9836)
- Remote control: Expose session_name and last_focused_at in the output of kitten @ ls for each window (#9732, #9799)
- Allow optionally dragging URLs with the mouse, see left (#9804)
- Change focus_follows_mouse to switch the active window only when the mouse crosses into a different window, instead of on every mouse motion event. Prevents accidental mouse bumps from undoing a keyboard-driven window switch.
- Wayland: Use hold gestures to cancel momentum scrolling when fingers are placed on the trackpad, for a more natural kinetic scrolling experience (#9863)
- macOS: Switch to new Tahoe style application icon with different background in light and dark modes
- Fix thickness of diagonal lines in box drawing characters not the same as horizontal/vertical lines (#9719)
- Graphics protocol: Fix crash when handling invalid PNG image with direct transmission (CVE 2026-33633)
- Graphics protocol: Fix crash when handling invalid offset values in graphics compose commands (CVE 2026-33642)
- X11: Fix a regression in the previous release that caused an occasional crash on input device removal (#9723)
- XWayland: Fix a regression where some wheel mice were not scrolling properly (#9770)
- Command palette: Improve searching to use word level matching (#9727)
- hints kitten: A new option to set the background color of matched text (#9745)
- The show_hyperlink_targets option now allows specifying a keyboard modifier so that target URLs are only shown on hover when the modifier is pressed (#9741)
- Fix a spurious mouse button release event being sent when dragging out of an OS window causes focus loss
- Fix scrollbar hover/interaction not working when the scrollbar is drawn in the window margin area (#9756)
- Fix completion for edit-in-kitty not including some common text file types
- Allow holding the Alt key and triple-clicking to select from the first cell even if it is empty (#9758)
- Fix double click to rename tab being triggered too easily (#9774)
- Fix a crash when user tries to select while the client program is using synchronised rendering and generating large amounts of output (#9778)
- macOS: Add Copy and Paste menu items to the Edit menu in the global menu bar (#9780)
- Fix dragging of splits layout borders sometimes moving in the wrong direction or having no effect (#9447)
- Fix triple-click line selection and double-click word selection not extending wrapped lines beyond the edges of the viewport
- Password input in kittens: hide the cursor and display a blinking 🔒 at the end of typed characters to make it visually clear the user is entering a password
- edit-in-kitty: Ignore environment variables as some editors execute code present in env vars. Similarly ignore conf file specifications for colors (CVE 2026-42851)
- Command palette ctrl+shift+f3: nicer grouping of aliases and combined actions (#9819)
- hints kitten: Fix trailing punctuation not being removed from URLs (#9828)
- Fix copy/paste dropping spaces at soft-wrap boundaries when strip_trailing_spaces is set (#9834)
- Allow setting negative values for inactive_text_alpha to control whether to only fade inactive windows or unfocused windows (#9837)
- A new option macos_fullscreen_ignore_safe_area_insets to control whether to ignore the notch space when using macos_traditional_fullscreen (#9841)
- Fix some responses from terminal sometimes leaking into shell after kitten exit (#9839)
- Render block elements from the Unicode Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement block (U+1CC00–U+1CEBF): separated block quadrants, separated block sextants, one sixteenth blocks, and one quarter block partial fills (#9849)
- Improve performance of using active process data when rendering the tab bar by only scanning processes once per second (#9862)
- macOS: Fix occasional phantom cursors being drawn on screen (#9725)
- diff kitten: Keep the current (topmost) filename visible when scrolling, controlled by a new option kitten-diff.sticky_header (#9891)
- Add an option to focus_follows_mouse to only switch focus on drops rather than movement (#9896)
- Fix setting momentum_scroll to zero not fully disabling momentum scrolling (#9904)
- macOS: Fix args passed via open --args being ignored when macos-launch-services-cmdline is present (#9910)
- save_as_session: when the filename input by the user has no extension, automatically add the .kitty-session extension (#9919)
- Linux: Workaround bug in Nvidia drivers that caused color corruption when resuming after suspend (#9844)
- choose-files kitten: Output a trailing newline when writing to a tty in text format (#9982)
- ssh kitten: Sanitize user controlled data in error messages that might leak to shell (CVE 2026-42850)
- Linux: Respect the fontconfig matrix setting commonly used for fake slant with fonts that do not have italic variants (#9990)
kitty for Mac
Free
In English
Version 0.47.0
Write a detailed review about kitty
(5 Reviews of kitty)
Comments
User Ratings
Aug 23, 2024
Version: 0.36.0
Great little terminal program. Highly recommneded.
Feb 18, 2022
Version: 0.24.2
It looks like the current version now requires macOS 10.14. Any chance of adding back support for macOS 10.13?
Aug 2, 2021
Version: 0.22.2
The developer is Kovid Goyal, developer of the remarkable Calibre application. -> https://kovidgoyal.net/ <- He's a hero of mine! (Even if he does *gag* like Ayn Rand and can't cook). If Kovid is 'codear' he's forgiven. Have a read through his website. He's a left-right brainer out to freely help the computer community and that's all right with me. I'm happy to support his work and try out 'kitty'.
Apr 29, 2021
Version: 0.20.2
the user codear has a visit count of 1, so this is a typical developer self comment.
can't say if its good, but how the settings are handled seems complicated.
Jul 17, 2020
Version: 0.18.1
excellent - cross platform, blazing fast terminal emulator with unique features, like unicode search, configuration terminal, gpu accelerated rendering, ligatures etc. if you frequently use terminal emulator and work on different operating systems - perfect choice.
