Kitty, one of the best GPU-accelerated and highly efficient cross-platform terminal emulators, has just unveiled its latest update—version 0.40. The main novelty is that Kitty now empowers terminal programs to specify and render text in different font sizes (more on that here).
Moreover, the developers have introduced a new option called “underline_exclusion,” which ensures that parts of characters descending below the baseline do not awkwardly overlap with underlines.
Kitty 0.40 also fixes text-width mismatches that have long bedeviled the terminal ecosystem. By allowing terminal programs to define how many cells a piece of text occupies, Kitty effectively ends the guesswork and frustration associated with misaligned or distorted output.
Furthermore, the behavior of the “notify_on_cmd_finish” option now depends on the visibility state of the operating system’s window—rather than simply the focus state—on platforms that support such functionality. In other words, Kitty offers more precise control over when and how to notify you about completed commands.
For Linux users, there is newly added support for COLRv1 fonts, which commonly power vector-based emoji sets. Additionally, speed boosts in the rendering of box-drawing characters, along with support for octant box-drawing, are also in place.
Kitty 0.40 also smartly manages background processes when deciding whether a window should remain open, preventing premature closure of active sessions. On the remote control side, “kitten @ scroll-window” now supports scrolling to the previous or next prompt, enhancing navigation in command logs.
As for macOS users, the update fixes an issue related to fallback font rendering for bold or italic symbols that share a regular font face but not the bold or italic variants.
In addition to these user-facing features, Kitty 0.40 quashes some pesky regressions, such as a crash triggered by an invalid Unicode with multiple combining characters and a bug that interfered with cursor shapes when using the “–hold” option.
Lastly, for those relying on Wayland, the terminal handles mouse pointer updates more cleanly when the application regains focus and introduces a center mode for panel creation to help developers build visually balanced pop-ups.
For more information, see the changelog.
