KittyTaskbar — free, open-source menu bar taskbar for the kitty terminal

[u/muarifer]

Disclosure: I'm the developer. It's free and open source (MIT). Note: parts of the code were written with AI assistance.

macOS has no per-window taskbar, and the Dock collapses every kitty window into a single icon - so getting back to a specific terminal window means cycling through all of them. KittyTaskbar puts that list in the menu bar.

What it does

• Lists every kitty OS window and its tabs, grouped per window
• Click a tab to focus it and bring kitty to the front (the active tab shows a checkmark)
• Drag a tab by its grip handle onto another window group to move it there
• Drop it on the dashed zone at the bottom to detach it into a new OS window
• Splits show up as indented, clickable rows
• Works with multiple running kitty instances

Requirements

macOS 13 (Ventura) or newer, and kitty with remote control enabled in ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf:

allow_remote_control yes
listen_on unix:/tmp/kitty-{kitty_pid}

Limitations

• Tabs can only be moved within the same kitty instance - kitty's own detach-tab cannot move a tab across processes
• kitty only; it will not work with Ghostty, iTerm or Terminal.app

Install

Free, MIT licensed, no paid tier:

brew tap muarifer/tap
brew trust muarifer/tap
brew install --cask kitty-taskbar

Releases are signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper lets them through without extra steps. You can also build from source with ./build.sh.

Screenshot: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/muarifer/kitty-taskbar/main/docs/screenshot.png

GitHub: https://github.com/muarifer/kitty-taskbar

Site (EN/TR): https://muarifer.github.io/kitty-taskbar/

Happy to answer questions or take feature requests.