Terminal compatibility

The commit graph and GitHub avatars are inline images. The terminal needs to speak one of three image protocols.

Image protocols

Terminal	Kitty	iTerm2	Sixel	Notes
Ghostty	✅	,	,	Recommended, what gitoui is developed on, all features tested first here.
Kitty	✅	,	,	Reference implementation of the protocol.
WezTerm	✅	✅	✅	Auto-detects; picks Kitty graphics first.
iTerm2 (macOS)	,	✅	,
Konsole	✅	,	✅	Kitty since 22.04, Sixel optional.
foot (Wayland)	,	,	✅	Sixel native; very fast.
xterm	,	,	🟡	Needs xterm -ti vt340.
Alacritty	,	,	,	No image protocol, graph falls back to Unicode.
Terminal.app (macOS)	,	,	,	Same fallback as Alacritty.
gnome-terminal / Ptyxis	🟡	,	,	Recent VTE (≥ 0.78) supports the Kitty protocol; older VTE falls back.
Windows Terminal	,	,	,	Unicode fallback only (as of Windows Terminal 1.x).

✅ first-class   🟡 config needed   , not supported

When in doubt, run gitoui --protocol sixel (or kitty, iterm2) to force a specific protocol and bypass auto-detect.

Keyboard protocol

gitoui pushes the Kitty keyboard protocol’s DISAMBIGUATE_ESCAPE_CODES flag at startup. This makes Alt+letter shortcuts arrive as a single KeyEvent on supporting terminals instead of Esc + letter (which would otherwise close the active view before the letter arrived).

Terminals that don’t speak the protocol silently ignore the push, Alt-key bindings work where the terminal sends them as proper meta-encoded events (most modern terminals do).

Alt keys not firing?

Switch to Ctrl+... for your custom bindings, see Custom keybindings.

Mouse + clipboard

• Mouse, enabled by default (ui.common.mouse_enabled = true). Click on rows / tabs / chips to interact. Wheel scrolls.
• Clipboard, system clipboard via the arboard crate. On Wayland, wl-copy is not required, arboard’s wayland-data-control feature talks the protocol directly.