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kovidgoyal
kitty
Python2017–2026
kovidgoyal / kitty
kitty
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
87Distinct people
113Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
35.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
GitHub
Where it is used
- Graphviz — Graphviz adds a -Tkitty output to display inline graphics using the kitty Terminal graphics protocol. This implements inline graphics in terminals that support that protocol, including kitty. Source
- mpv (media player) — mpv is documented on kitty's integrations page as using kitty's graphics/video output (vo=kitty) to play videos in the terminal. Source
What people are saying
I mostly switched to librem 14, arch linux (i3wm, gnome from time to time), still using a mac for work (mostly presentations, video conferencing). Development tends to get more…
kgarten used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- alacritty/alacritty · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- gnachman/iterm2 · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- tmux/tmux · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year113 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-01-07 04:17:33 UTC to 2026-10-07 18:29:01 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 1 | 13 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 3 | 10 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 1 | 11 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 2 | 12 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 19 | 1 | 18 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 1 | 10 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
What Hacker News says
12 sources5E5e92cb50239222b·Nov 16, 2022
> If anyone knows of a good one for Linux, please let me know!
kitty has excellent support for this stuff, and is much more performant than anything based on vte (like gnome-terminal).
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
In Libgrapheme: A simple freestanding C99 library for UnicodeOP here. There are a few projects that I wasn't able to work into the story that I think are worth a mention (though some of them are in that Awesome Terminals round-up linked in the article).
The Cobra library is a huge one: https://github.com/spf13/cobra
Other stuff worth a look includes:
Tmux: https://github.com/tmux/tmux
Kitty: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
Alacritty: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty
I'm sure there's lots of other stuff I don't know about as well.
In A look at various trends shaping the future of the command lineOh man, this is rich :))) Let me just leave this for posterity. kitty has had a socket for remote control for years: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.allow_remote... (see socket-only). It can allow remote control from specific windows while disallowing it generally: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/launch/#cmdoption-launch-all...
Furthermore the next release of kitty has capability based security for remote control with public key crypto to keep the data safe: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/5320
I suggest you find a better place to move the goalposts in your attempts to smear and spread FUD.
In Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012)Because security is hard nobody should even try?
The general trick with parsing is to put it in a sandbox that cannot touch files, can only do limited syscalls, etc. This is what e.g. Chrome does.
But yes, it's obvious the Kitty author has no interest in making it more secure ( https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084) and it's obviously you take discussions about improving software security as attacks on your person.
Have a good day, sir.
In Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012)> First of all stdout is an integer in a lookup table in your kernel, It cant read or delete anything.
Oh come on, you know what everyone means. "Output with potentially hostile content".
Right now it seems kitty will happily delete e.g. /tmp/.X11-unix/X0. That sounds fun.
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/#the-trans...
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/5541e3c2ff441aea319...
In Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012)> His only 'crime' was being blunt with a bug report around eleven years ago
Here's something from 2018: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41...
In New in Calibre 6.0Terminal Multiplexers Are Hacks (2020)
1 points · Open discussionWhat makes you think that other terminals like https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty or https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty can't catch-up in features?
For one, closed-source is a non starter to many and I only see this trend going up.
No, this is not a dropbox-like launch. And criticism seems pretty fair so far.
In Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminalI use i3 and win+enter is bound to spawn a new terminal. I had read that kitty was supposed to be super fast, but I tried it out and spawning a terminal was taking .5-1 second!
I looked it up and found https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/330 where the dev says:
> that's just python interpreter startup time
So... The answer is just "yeah it's slow". When you're used to a few milliseconds for terminal spawn, .5s is eons.
In Vim Color SchemesAFAICT he bluntly closed the issue that asks for CJK input support in kitty. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/462 I understand there might be technical difficulties but his attitude is disappointingly bad.
In Kitty: The fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal emulatorNope. KiTTY came first, and the issue of name collision has been raised with the author of Kitty - https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9
In Kitty: The fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal emulatorYou can configure kitty to open the entire scrollback buffer in an editor or a pager(less/nvim etc).
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/719
In Charm – Tools to make the command line glamorous