Compatibility
Boring Terminal ships its own VT emulator, checked against the independent
esctest2 conformance suite in CI (102 tests passing; every exclusion has a
written reason). Sessions run with TERM=xterm-256color and truecolor.
This page is the honest summary. If it isn't listed as supported, assume it isn't; unknown sequences are consumed and ignored, never printed.
Supported
Core VT. The full cursor/editing CSI set, scroll regions, tab stops,
alt screen (1049 and friends), origin/autowrap modes, ED 3 scrollback clear,
DEC Special Graphics line drawing, DECSTR/RIS resets.
Styling. Full SGR: truecolor and indexed color in both ; and : forms,
underline styles 4:0–4:5 with underline color (58/59), bold/faint/italic/
inverse/strikethrough.
Keyboard. The Kitty keyboard protocol, all five progressive-enhancement flags, with per-screen push/pop stacks, plus standard xterm encodings, bracketed paste (2004), and focus reporting (1004).
Graphics. The Kitty graphics protocol: direct, shared-memory, and file transports; PNG and zlib; placements including Unicode placeholders; z-order; deletion; animation. This is how images and video render inline.
Mouse. Click (1000), drag (1002), and motion (1003) tracking with SGR (1006) and SGR-pixels (1016) encodings, including horizontal scroll.
OSC. Titles (0/2), working directory (7), hyperlinks (8), notifications (9 and 777), semantic prompts (133 with exit codes), color queries (10/11/12).
Queries. Truthful DA1/DA2, DSR, DECRQM, DECRQSS, XTGETTCAP, XTVERSION, and the report-only XTWINOPS subset. Synchronized output (2026) and grapheme clustering (2027) are supported and reported honestly.
Not yet
- OSC 52 clipboard access
- OSC 4 palette and OSC 10/11/12 color setters (queries work)
- Option-as-Meta (⌥ composes text today)
- Cursor shapes other than block (DECSCUSR is parsed and ignored)
Never
Declined deliberately; see the philosophy:
- Sixel and iTerm2 inline images: Kitty graphics is the one media protocol
- Legacy mouse encodings 1005/1015 (SGR has superseded them)
- 132-column mode (DECCOLM), NRCS character sets
- Window resize/move/iconify requests via XTWINOPS: apps don't get to move your windows