Kitty 0.50 is a statement release. The headline feature — dockable windows — transforms the terminal from a grid of panes into something closer to a tiling window manager. You can now pin status bars, file trees, and utility panels to the edges of other windows or tabs, created via launch --type=window-dock or launch --type=tab-dock. This is kitty telling you it doesn't think the terminal should stay in its lane. The second tentpole is restoresessionafterlogout, which saves and restores the entire state of every kitty instance — including scrollback — across logouts, restarts, and shutdowns. On macOS, the state is encrypted via keychain; on Linux, it relies on the Inhibit desktop portal. This is the feature that turns kitty from a tool you launch into an environment you inhabit. Combined with the new named-workspace tab model (launch --focus-existing, alphabetical tab ordering via by-title, and cross-tab window detachment), kitty is building a session-persistence layer that most IDEs still lack. The shader system gets a joyful expansion: cursor-trail-railgun, cursor-trail-torpedo, and cursor-trail-pixiedust make particles fly off the cursor neovide-style. Shaders can now respond to key presses, fade in and out, loop and reverse via new animation pipeline directives, and define pointermap() functions so mouse clicks land on the correct text even when the shader moves content (the CRT shader uses this). A fix for animations going jerky after a few hours of runtime suggests these aren't toys — people actually use them. The graphics protocol picks up two indexed-color image formats whose pixels reference the terminal palette, meaning images shift color when your theme changes. A new e query key lets clients detect support for specific protocol features like animation and Unicode placeholders. Program Status Protocol support (OSC 7501) lets running programs report their state — working, finished, failed, blocked — which surfaces in the tab bar. Wayland gets native-looking GNOME decorations that follow the desktop's titlebar font, text scaling, button layout, and click actions, plus full touchscreen support with tap-to-click, momentum scrolling, and finger-hold text selection. The bugfix surface area is enormous and revealing. Remote control authentication had a vulnerability where a crafted request could bypass password-based auth by masquerading as a cancellation of an async request — now patched. Multiple remote control commands were silently ignoring options or reporting false success. Terminal emulation fixes cover origin mode cursor reports, multicell character erasure, emoji sequence wrapping, heap buffer overflows, out-of-bounds writes, and use-after-free on config reload. The SSH kitten fixes cover permission preservation, symlink resolution, silent connection death, and color palette handling. Performance work targets GPU sprite cache growth (especially on macOS), CPU usage with non-zero inputdelay, and a subtle fix to stop continuous re-rendering when a selection is present in scrollback. A new anti-flicker measure suppresses rendering between frames for programs that draw with many small partial updates. Box drawing characters, cursors, and title bar borders now scale with font size — a detail that matters the moment you zoom. This is a release from a project that treats the terminal as a first-class application platform rather than a legacy compatibility surface. The feature velocity is high, the surface area is vast, and the willingness to absorb complexity — from shader pipelines to desktop portal integration to graphics protocol extensions — is what separates kitty from terminals that ship themes and call it a release.
