Kitty 0.50: Docked Windows and Session Restoration

Kitty terminal emulator version 0.50 introduces docked windows that anchor to edges of other windows or tabs, creating persistent sidebars for status displays, file trees, or shells alongside an editor. A new session restoration feature saves the complete state—all windows, tabs, and scrollback—when logging out or shutting down, automatically recovering everything on the next launch with encryption for stored sessions on macOS.

The preceding version 0.49 delivered substantial performance gains, improving throughput by 15-35% depending on workload. Key optimizations include SIMD-accelerated UTF-8 decoding that runs 20% faster for ASCII and 50% faster for multibyte characters, with AVX-512 variants reaching 75% speedup on compatible processors. Additional improvements optimize scrollback buffer prefetching, batch text rendering, escape code parsing, and pixel compositing. Earlier releases added vertical tabs, drag-and-drop file handling, enhanced mouse controls with smooth scrolling and window resizing, a keyboard-first file selector, multiple native cursors, and variable font support.