Are you being deliberately obtuse? Yes obviously when asked to display a file, kitty will read it. But it wont send the file contents on the TTY, so the *program sending the request* cannot read it. Which is what we are discussing here. You are trying to make it seem like the ability of a program to get kitty to read an arbitrary file is a security issue. I suggest you go do the following: strace your editor, then ask it to open /etc/passwd, and then be shocked when you see it doing so in the strace log. Seriously, why am I wasting time replying to you.

I'm trying to make it seem like kitty doesn't have very strong security boundaries, and it's a bit of unknown what it can and cannot be made to do.

Me asking my editor to open /etc/passwd is me asking my editor to do something. My terminal emulator opening files and parsing them and deleting them just because I viewed untrusted content is something different. If you want to make that argument, you need to come up with an example where my editor accesses attacker-controlled files because I opened a random README.md.

Also, please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and shove your attitude.

Ah so classic FUD, "its unknown what it can do". Why dont you spend some effort figuring out what it can actually do instead of making driveby comments with an obvious axe to grind.

You very conveniently left out the fact that pretty much anything that views untrusted content has to parse files. If parsing files is where your "security boundaries" lie, I suggest you drop your computer off at the garbage dump. Hell if your editor has a preview function it too will parse untrusted content. Basically, to do anything software has to parse untrusted content. And just by the way, /etc/passwd is not attacker controlled. If the attacker has access to your filesystem already, she really doesnt need to use kitty to do anything. And "opening" README.md will not cause kitty to parse files, unless by "opening" you mean catting without -v. In which case we are back to your mommy told you to know better but you didn't listen.

At this point its obvious you are deliberately trying to spread FUD. I am done interacting with you. Good bye.

Because security is hard nobody should even try?

The general trick with parsing is to put it in a sandbox that cannot touch files, can only do limited syscalls, etc. This is what e.g. Chrome does.

But yes, it's obvious the Kitty author has no interest in making it more secure ( https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084) and it's obviously you take discussions about improving software security as attacks on your person.

Have a good day, sir.

Oh man, this is rich :))) Let me just leave this for posterity. kitty has had a socket for remote control for years: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.allow_remote... (see socket-only). It can allow remote control from specific windows while disallowing it generally: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/launch/#cmdoption-launch-all...

Furthermore the next release of kitty has capability based security for remote control with public key crypto to keep the data safe: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/5320

I suggest you find a better place to move the goalposts in your attempts to smear and spread FUD.