Kaleidoscope

Release Notes Kaleidoscope 7.0.1 10509 July 30, 2026 Enhancements

• Added an Enable Automatic Alignment setting in Settings > Images, letting you turn off AI-assisted image alignment.
• Live Working Copy Changes notification and pause settings (the bell button in the toolbar) are now remembered across documents. Bugfixes
• Fixed a stuck alignment spinner in Image Comparisons.
• Fixed changeset rows in Live Working Copy Changes occasionally showing the wrong or duplicate file name.
• Various smaller fixes and improvements. Kaleidoscope 7.0 10499 July 28, 2026 New
• Live Working Copy Changes. Working copy changesets now update in real time as files change, whether those changes come from you, your editor, or a coding agent. The document stays connected to your working copy — no more reopening to see the latest state. This also works when launching a comparison via git difftool. If you work with coding agents, try leaving a changeset open while an agent works in the background!
• The sidebar keeps up, too: files that become modified appear automatically, even files that were clean when you opened the document.
• Untracked files appear in real time as well, marked with a question mark until you add them to Git.
• The staging state of each file is visible at a glance: fully staged files use a solid icon, partly staged files a hollow one.
• When Kaleidoscope is in the background, notifications report changes and Git operations such as commits and reverts. Clicking a notification takes you directly to the relevant changes.
• New toolbar controls let you pause and resume live updates, and configure which notifications you receive.
• Git worktrees are fully supported.
• Unified Changeset Navigation. Using Navigate > Next Change and Navigate > Previous Change, you can now optionally jump across file boundaries, letting you review an entire changeset with a single set of keyboard shortcuts, ⌘↓ and ⌘↑.
• Commit Graph. The Commit History introduced in Kaleidoscope 6.7 now visualizes the Git commit graph, helping you understand branches, merges, and commit relationships. Enhancements
• Initial adjustments for macOS Golden Gate (27.0 Beta). Please let us know if you run into issues.
• Improved performance when switching between files in changesets.
• Syntax highlighting for various kinds of Xojo files, Dockerfile syntax, and several F# file types.
• Added support for the Insiders edition of VS Code as an external text editor.
• Support for the Otty Terminal app.
• Better detection of external text editors installed via Homebrew or in ~/Applications.
• Modernized the available Shortcuts actions and added two new ones:
• Open Changeset. Given a commit hash (SHA), it will open all changes of that commit. The repository needs to be known to Kaleidoscope so it can find the commit.
• Open Live Working Copy Changes. Given a path to a Git repository, this opens the live working copy changes for that repository.
• Improvements to the kaleidoscope URL scheme:
• Use kaleidoscope://changeset?path= to open live working copy changes for that directory. ~ will be resolved as expected.
• To open a commit changeset use kaleidoscope://changeset with the parameter ?sha= or ?hash= for better distinction.
• New command kaleidoscope://commit?sha= or hash= to open a particular commit in the Lookup Commit window. As usual, the containing repository needs to be in the Repositories list.
• When Kaleidoscope is unable to fulfill a URL request, you now get a response in the form of a notification. Bugfixes
• Fixed a crash with ksdiff --changeset --filelist file1.txt file2.txt.
• Various smaller fixes and improvements. Kaleidoscope 6.7 10249 April 24, 2026 New
• See changesets in the same hierarchy as your files on disk. In addition to the traditional flat file list, you can now browse changesets in a folder-based outline that keeps the surrounding structure visible and makes it easier to stay oriented in larger changesets. A new option in Settings > Git controls the default behavior.
• Understand how a changeset came to be without leaving the comparison. A new Commit History sidebar mode lets you inspect the commits behind the compared revisions directly within the changeset. View full commit messages and open changesets for individual commits from there.
• Kaleidoscope now fully supports Git worktrees. As more development tools and workflows adopt worktrees, Kaleidoscope can now recognize and present them correctly across repository browsing, compare pickers, recents, and revision badges. You can also quickly compare different worktrees. If you do not use worktrees, this added complexity remains invisible. Enhancements
• Branch, tag, worktree, and commit hash badges are now shown in window title bars. Most badges offer actions via context menus.
• Syntax coloring is now available for MATLAB files. Note that you will need to manually select MATLAB, as the file extension .m conflicts with Objective-C.
• Syntax coloring is now available for Embedded Ruby (ERB) files.
• Improved rendering of Git commit messages, with better handling of different newline styles.
• Improved Automatic Image Alignment: For formats like PNG and TIFF, Kaleidoscope now skips Perspective Alignment and automatically selects the best anchor alignment—resulting in more reliable alignment for screenshots and synthetic images.
• Many refinements to the changeset sidebar on macOS Tahoe. Bugfixes
• Various fixes and refinements across changesets, Git comparisons, and UI details. Kaleidoscope 6.6 9910 February 26, 2026 New
• Automatic AI-powered image alignment. When opening or selecting a pair of images, Kaleidoscope aligns them automatically using different methods (2D and 3D) and chooses the best result. Thoroughly tested with both screenshots and photographs.
• New Manual Alignment Options. Use the enhanced alignment view to fine-tune positioning when needed. In addition to the anchor alignment added in Kaleidoscope 6.4, you can now also specify an X and Y offset to precisely align images of different size.
• You can continue interacting with the image views while the alignment options are shown — switch between images, change view modes, or zoom and pan to evaluate alignment.
• Single-key shortcuts are available in the alignment view:
• O for Position
• E for Perspective
• A for Automatic (in Position mode)
• M for Manual (in Position mode) Enhancements
• New Pixel Comparison Customization
• Option to disable automatic collapsing of the info views for images A and B.
• Option to always show color channel values as floating-point numbers instead of 0–255 integers.
• Improved Color bars
• When ranges become large, color bars switch to logarithmic (or double-logarithmic) scaling.
• For extended ranges, color bars display a subtle indicator at the default maximum values.
• Lab, HSB, and HSV formats now support extended color ranges.
• The “Add from Clipboard” button could fail when multiple formats were present on the clipboard (a common case with Electron-based apps). Kaleidoscope now selects the format that best matches the current document instead of inserting the first available item. Bugfixes
• Prevented unintended zoom animations when switching between image items in a changeset.
• Fixed an issue where uninstalling ksdiff could fail in certain circumstances.
• Various other smaller improvements and fixes. Kaleidoscope 6.5 9664 January 27, 2026 New

The brand new Pixel Comparison adds powerful new capabilities to Image Comparisons. It enables you to evaluate even the slightest color changes between images.

• The Pixel Comparison lives in an inspector sidebar.
• By default, it continuously updates as you hover over pixels in the images you are comparing.
• Large color swatches show the sampled color of image A and image B side by side.
• A convenient hex color string represents the color, or an approximation if the color can’t be expressed in sRGB.
• See all relevant aspects of each pixel in the native format of the image (rendered in RGB). This includes exact color values, coordinates within the image, image size, color format including the real ranges of all color channels, and the color profile.
• See a single difference value between the two pixels, expressed on a scale from 0 to 1, as shown in Proportional Difference mode.
• Precisely compare the color channels of both pixels in a variety of formats, including RGB, HSB, HSL, and Lab.
• If values between A and B are different, they are highlighted in blue. For small differences, bold type puts even more focus on the change.
• Lock a specific pixel sample using various methods, such as double-clicking (a single click unlocks it again), a keyboard shortcut (⇧⌘L), or the context menu.
• In Two-Up view, or when sampling is locked, the sampled coordinates in both images are highlighted with a clearly visible crosshair.
• A new option in Settings > Images lets you toggle the Pixel Comparison on or off by default when opening an Image Comparison.
• Developers for Apple platforms increasingly work with SVG image assets. While these are XML files, Kaleidoscope now supports rendering SVG files as images for visual comparison. You can choose your preferred behavior in Settings > Files.
• Kaleidoscope Prism can now directly compare files selected in Finder. Assign a keyboard shortcut in Kaleidoscope Prism settings and compare the Finder selection instantly, without switching apps or dragging and dropping files.
• A large number of JetBrains IDEs can now be used to edit text directly from Kaleidoscope. When files are opened in a project context, the precise position within the file is retained, enabling a very fast turnaround between comparison and editing. Supported apps include Fleet, GoLand, IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, RustRover, WebStorm, and Android Studio. Enhancements
• Stepping through image comparisons within a changeset is now much smoother and no longer causes flickering between images.
• The Processing button in the bottom toolbar now presents JSON Normalization and Text Filters in a popover instead of a menu, making it much quicker to enable multiple filters at once.
• You can now search for changeset items that do not contain specific characters. For example, enter !NS to find items that don’t include the substring “NS”. Bugfixes
• Setting Render Differences to Proportional in Settings > Images did not work since Kaleidoscope 6.4.
• Other smaller fixes and improvements. Kaleidoscope 6.4.1 9379 December 23, 2025 New
• Three new Text Filters have been added to quickly filter out C-style, single-line HTML, and shell-style comments. This is useful for spotting unexpected code changes, for example when asking an AI agent to add documentation to a file. Enhancements
• When changing the content of an existing image comparison, such as when swapping images, changing items in the File Shelf, or adding a new image (e.g. via ksdiff or kspo), Kaleidoscope will no longer reset the zoom and scroll position.
• Kaleidoscope now picks up the PATH from your environment when searching for tools like text editors. This means you no longer need to install tools in known system locations like /usr/local/bin. Bugfixes
• Type to select has been disabled in the changeset list so it doesn't override keyboard shortcuts without modifiers, such as H, V, S, D, A, and P, in the Image Comparison.
• A few smaller fixes and improvements. Kaleidoscope 6.4 9356 December 18, 2025 New
• All-New Image Comparison The Image Comparison in Kaleidoscope has been completely rewritten from scratch, resulting in significantly improved performance and enabling new features. Read our blog post for more background and technical details behind this rewrite. Highlights include:
• Compare larger image files with significantly improved performance.

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