A Judgement Delayed

Kitty is a work in progress. As I write, the latest version is 24.4, which at Goyal's usual release rate could mean that the general release is several years away. Therefore, kitty's complete list of features cannot yet be known. However, I have to wonder how useful some of the implemented features are to command-line users. For example, can text formatting or emoticons have any useful purpose at the prompt? Perhaps in email? Or can a new purpose evolve? And if a new purpose does evolve, will users care about it? Users have long ago learned to use ASCII art for emoticons, asterisks to indicate italics, and underscores to indicate a bold weight. Will many see a need to change? Just because a feature is practical does not mean that is needed.

Kitty does have some features that change how commands are entered or code is written, such as marking text and multiple buffers. So far, the most useful feature may be its graphical acceleration. It seems absurd, for example, that Konsole should be consistently in the top five resource-hogging applications, second only to Plasma's window manager. For graphical acceleration alone, kitty may end up being worthwhile. For now, all that can definitely be said is that kitty is a project worth watching. In the long run, it might just be the future of terminal emulation.