Kitty terminal emulator 0.49 released with custom shader support & major performance boost

Kitty, the popular GPU-accelerated terminal emulator, has released version 0.49, introducing official support for custom shaders alongside significant performance improvements. The update enables users to apply a wide range of graphical effects, from animated backgrounds to focus highlighting and dynamic cursor movement visualizations. The release also includes a video gallery showcasing various shader implementations available in the documentation.

Beyond its visual enhancements, the 0.49 update delivers substantial throughput gains ranging from 15-35% depending on workload. According to the changelog, improvements include optimized scrollback buffer memory prefetching, which delivers roughly 35% better performance when handling text larger than CPU cache, and batched ASCII character rendering that boosts throughput by approximately 50% for ASCII and 15% for Unicode text. The release also brings rounded window border styling through the new window_border_radius configuration option, a new remap_modifiers option to allow having modifier keys behave as different modifier keys, better vertical tabs' handling, improved Wayland support, and various bug fixes.