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

00:11:00 - What's the difference between the kitty graphics protocol and sixel?

00:13:50 - What is Chafa?

00:15:11 - In terms of Neovim, can you explain what the Keyboard Protocol is?

00:18:43 - Undercurl, another protocol provided by Kovid to terminals

00:19:30 - Text sizing protocol, what is it?

00:25:22 - Neovim: What is needed to have variable font size?

00:27:55 - PR for kitty graphics protocol in Neovim terminal?

00:29:58 - choose-files kitten

00:31:51 - Will you add the chenglou pretext thing?

00:34:19 - Kitty Clipboard Protocol

00:35:57 - Kitty keyboard protocol coming to Ghostty? Works on macOS

00:36:56 - Does it replace OSC52?

00:38:33 - So are you trying to make Kitty like emacs?

00:39:57 - Drag and drop requested by developer of Yazi

00:41:11 - Drag and drop Kitty tabs?

00:43:39 - Why so many editors in the AI era, why Neovim like if its the 70s?

00:47:32 - Demos start: Resize kitty windows with mouse

00:48:46 - Drag tabs and windows around, even out to a new window

00:50:48 - Pixel scrolling, partial scrolling

00:52:14 - Momentum scrolling

00:52:48 - Partial scrolling works only with default scrollback, not in neovim

00:53:48 - Drag and drop links current behavior

00:56:12 - Drag and drop protocol

00:56:47 - kitten mouse-demo

00:57:33 - Demo drag and drop over SSH

00:59:48 - How do you feel about new features in kitty, you accept everything?

01:01:28 - What are your top 5 CLI tools?

01:03:43 - Dolev creator of gh-dash asks about browsers

01:05:23 - Demo: Kovid's top 5 neovim plugins?

01:08:38 - Conditional mappings depending on the state of the focused window

01:09:59 - Thoughts on alcohol and drugs?

01:12:40 - Thoughts on religion