Kovid Goyal on Kitty: Drag and Drop, Pixel Scrolling, and What’s Next

Mitchell Hashimoto wasn’t able to join this episode for personal reasons, so we made a small pivot.

A lot of people already knew about the original Ghostty vs Kitty livestream, so I wanted to explain that clearly here too. Mitchell couldn’t make it this time, and I completely understand. We’ll see what happens in the future.

That said, this still turned into a really fun conversation with Kovid Goyal, creator of kitty and calibre.

In this episode, we talk about kitty, recent popular features, terminal UX, design choices, performance, workflows, and some of what may be coming next. Kovid also talks about things like pixel scrolling with momentum, drag and drop for kitty UI elements like windows and tabs, and an early look at a possible future drag and drop protocol for terminal programs, which could make things like transferring files between two different computers much easier.

So even though this is no longer a Ghostty vs Kitty conversation, I still think this episode will be really interesting if you care about terminal emulators, keyboard-driven workflows, macOS, Linux, Neovim, native apps, developer tools, and open source software.

Video:

https://youtu.be/UDNVICQMXB0

What's the best way to support me?

https://linkarzu.com/about/#youre-a-fraud-why-do-you-ask-for-money-isnt-youtube-ads-enough

Timeline:

00:00:00 - Highlights

00:02:10 - Who is Kovid and what protocols he has contributed to the terminal ecosystem