// the find
kovidgoyal/kitty
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
kitty is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that renders via OpenGL, which actually matters for scrollback performance and image rendering. It's the de facto origin of two terminal protocols that are now spreading across the ecosystem: the Kitty Graphics Protocol (inline images) and the Kitty Keyboard Protocol (finally fixes modifier key disambiguation). If you're on Linux or macOS and live in a terminal, it's worth serious consideration.
The GPU rendering is not a gimmick — scrolling through large buffers is visibly smoother than software-rendered alternatives, and rendering complex Unicode or wide characters doesn't degrade. The Kitty Keyboard Protocol has now been adopted by Ghostty, WezTerm, foot, and several others, meaning Neovim and similar editors can finally distinguish Ctrl+I from Tab; kitty originated this and has had it longest. The SSH kitten is genuinely clever: it can copy your local kitty config, shell integration, and terminfo to a remote host transparently on first connect, so your remote session feels local. The kittens plugin architecture (diff viewer, inline image display, file picker, command palette) means you can extend the terminal with well-integrated tools rather than bolting separate utilities on top.
Windows is simply not supported and there's no indication that will change — if any of your team or users are on Windows, this is a non-starter. macOS support works but feels grudging; the author has said so explicitly, and it shows in occasional rendering glitches and the slower pace of macOS-specific fixes. The codebase is C + Python + Go, which makes building from source non-trivial and means you're carrying three language toolchains for one binary; the build system is Python-driven and not the standard CMake/meson you'd expect. The author closes issue reports aggressively, sometimes before a bug is actually understood — if you hit an edge case, the support experience can be frustrating.