Terminal emulator Kitty adds Quake-style quick-access terminal and other enhancements

Kitty 0.42 introduces a Quake-style floating terminal window with adjustable transparency, enabling users to access this GPU-based terminal emulator instantly by pressing a single key. This feature streamlines workflows where rapid terminal access is needed, without disrupting other application windows.

Following this, the panel kitten — a feature that sets terminal applications as a desktop wallpaper — now works across macOS, X11, and Wayland. Users can create multiple panels within a single process and configure these desktop-integrated terminals to launch automatically at startup, broadening customization options for power users.

Building on text rendering improvements, kitty now performs full grapheme segmentation in accordance with the Unicode 16 specification. The automatic color switching feature has also been updated to manage background image settings, helping maintain visual consistency across different themes.

Additionally, users can now launch kitty with the operating system window hidden. This is particularly advantageous in single instance setups. New configuration options have been added for mouse unhide behavior, and the diff kitten tool introduces shortcut bindings for half and full page scrolling alongside new support for diffing named pipes. The release also includes several minor enhancements and bug fixes.