What is kitty used for?

kitty is a fast, cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator with tabs, split layouts and an extension system called kittens. It is a good fit for daily terminal for developers and sysadmins, and viewing images and diffs inside the terminal.

Is kitty open source?

Yes. kitty is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at kovidgoyal/kitty and is written mainly in Python.

Yes. kitty is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What is kitty an alternative to?

kitty is an open-source alternative to Warp. Other open-source alternatives to Warp include Alacritty, Ghostty and WezTerm.

Is kitty actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to kitty was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.49.2, published on 1 October 2026. The project has 35k stars on GitHub.

kitty: open-source alternative to Warp

About kitty

kitty is a terminal emulator for people who spend much of their day in the command line. It is cross-platform and uses the GPU along with SIMD vector CPU instructions and multiple threads to keep rendering responsive. The project is written in Python, C and Go, and it is released under the GPL-3.0 license.

Window management is built in: tabs and windows can be arranged in layouts such as stack, tall, fat, grid, splits, horizontal and vertical, and sessions can restore a setup. Behavior is controlled through a kitty.conf file covering fonts, cursor, scrollback, mouse actions, tab bar and color schemes, including wide-gamut color formats. Kittens extend the terminal, for example icat for showing images and a diff viewer that can integrate with git. The documentation includes a quickstart, build instructions and a design philosophy page.

Key features

GPU-based rendering with threaded design
Tabs, windows and multiple split layouts
Text-file configuration for fonts and colors
Kittens such as icat image display
Built-in diff viewer with git integration
Session support and mappable keyboard actions

Good fit for

→Daily terminal for developers and sysadmins
→Viewing images and diffs inside the terminal

Built with: Python; Go
Tags: terminal; terminal-emulator; gpu; cross-platform; command-line; python; developer-tools

kitty: questions and answers

What is kitty used for?: kitty is a fast, cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator with tabs, split layouts and an extension system called kittens. It is a good fit for daily terminal for developers and sysadmins, and viewing images and diffs inside the terminal.
Is kitty open source?: Yes. kitty is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at kovidgoyal/kitty and is written mainly in Python.
Is kitty free?: Yes. kitty is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What is kitty an alternative to?: kitty is an open-source alternative to Warp. Other open-source alternatives to Warp include Alacritty, Ghostty and WezTerm.
Is kitty actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to kitty was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.49.2, published on 1 October 2026. The project has 35k stars on GitHub.