If you are on a Linux system then there's a good chance that you will use the command line for a really long period. The Terminal (or the command line) is a huge part of the Linux experience (especially for developers). So it's important that your Linux terminal is convenient, customizable and fast.

The default terminal on various Linux distros are very neat but there are a lot of features that can make them more functional and effective. You can use terminal emulators for this purpose. Emulators basically provide additional functionalities on top of your classic terminal.

After spending a lot of time searching on the internet for quality terminal emulators, I came across Kitty. And oh boy, is it a hell of a terminal!

Why use Kitty?

Kitty (developed by Kovid Goyal) has got all the features that I really wanted when I was looking for emulators on the internet so I instantly fell in love with it. Here are some of them:

Highly customizable:

Kitty has a configuration file kitty.conf which you can edit and it's very easy to adjust various parameters like fonts, keyboard shortcuts, scrolling, tab preferences, colors, etc according to your needs.

It is highly customizable and you can look up all the details about it in the documentation: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/

Tabs:

This is a very basic feature but a very big number of emulators don't support it. Kitty has shortcuts for creating tabs. You can also create a sub-tab which basically splits the terminal in half giving you two tabs one above the other. There are many layout options that you can choose from.

It's fast and scriptable

It uses the GPU for fast rendering so the terminal runs very smoothly. It also uses threaded rendering for low latency.

Kitty has a framework for easily creating terminal programs called kittens which is very handy. You can also control the terminal using scripts.

Themes:

You can customize the colors of the terminal easily by creating your own theme and editing it in the kitty.conf file.

If your want to use an existing theme then just run: kitty +kitten themes in the terminal. This will open an interactive program through which you can select a theme that you like. I personally like the Cyberpunk-Neon theme.

Website of Kitty emulator: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

You can install Kitty from here: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/quickstart/

Github page: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty