Terminal emulator kitty releases version 0.33 with improved speed and performance

The GPU-based terminal emulator for macOS and Linux, kitty, has recently launched its 0.33 version. The new release comes with a significant performance boost, as the software now parses incoming data in parallel using SIMD vector CPU instructions. This upgrade has resulted in a 2x speedup in benchmarks and a 10%-50% real world speedup, depending on workload. The team behind kitty refers to this enhanced speed as cheetah speed, and claims that it surpasses other terminal emulators in terms of speed, based on the new kitten benchmark for terminal throughput performance.

The team also noted that despite kitty's already impressive speed, this update takes its performance to a new level, while also reducing energy consumption for the same tasks.

In addition to its speed enhancements, kitty 0.33 introduces improved graphics and keyboard protocols. A new action, toggle_tab, has been added to allow users to switch to and from a tab using a single shortcut.

The latest version of kitty also addresses a performance issue when handling thousands of small images. Along with this, the update brings a multitude of changes, enhancements, and bug fixes to the popular terminal emulator.