Kitty 0.50 Terminal Adds Docked Windows and Session Restore on Logout

New Docked Window Functionality

Kitty 0.50 introduces docked windows, which can be attached to the edge of another window or a tab. These docked windows operate outside the main layout, making them suitable for elements like status bars, file trees, or persistent shell instances alongside an editor. A window-dock follows its parent window across tabs and closes with it, while tab-docks remain with the tab. Docked window configurations are also saved within sessions.

Session Restoration After Logout

The new release allows Kitty to save and restore its complete state upon user logout, system restart, or shutdown. When the user logs back in, all Kitty instances, including their OS windows, tabs, windows, and scrollback buffers, are restored. On macOS, the saved state is encrypted using the system's keychain for security.

Previous Updates: Custom Shaders and Performance

Version 0.49 of Kitty introduced official support for custom shaders. These shaders enable various graphical effects, such as animated backgrounds, focus highlighting, and visual changes for cursor movements or mouse clicks. This feature allows for greater personalization of the terminal's appearance and behavior.

Throughput Improvements in 0.49

Version 0.49 also included significant performance enhancements, resulting in a 15-35% improvement in real-world effective throughput, depending on the workload. Specific optimizations include a 35% improvement in processing large text with large scrollback buffers by prefetching memory, a 15-50% speedup in general text processing by batching ASCII writes and optimizing scrolling, and faster SIMD UTF-8 decoding (20-50% faster for ASCII/multi-byte text on x86/ARM, with an AVX-512 decoder adding another 75% for multi-byte text on supported CPUs).