this might make sense to bolt onto the x11 adapter if it doesn't complect things too much. (i think that's better than a separate kitty adapter because dispatch doesn't have a good way to configure priority)

Do you mean as opposed to an external adapter, or a separate internal adapter? If there's a decision being made in the x11 adapter about whether to use kitty, then it would just be creating a priority through code rather than using the ordering system in dispatch. Kitty could be disabled like any other adapter in dispatch using g:loaded_kitty_dispatch = 1

that doesn't work. it's not the right naming convention and if you fix that you get an unknown function error (edit: i guess it works for your external adapter)

but really, my objection is if change my preferred terminal, I shouldn't have to also reconfigure dispatch.vim. just let me set $TERMINAL or some other global configuration

sorry, I was just throwing a random name that sounded right. If I was integrating I'd follow the internal convention. Changing preferred terminal will cause automatic switching, the kitty adapter would only activate when you were using a kitty terminal.

does this mean you can't call it from gvim?

kitty supports a remote control api, so if you had a kitty terminal open you could send things to it by let $KITTY_LISTEN_ON = "the_listen_address" but that could be at our discretion.

for me, the use case is entirely that I have a kitty terminal open and want to be able to tab around into a long-running process. I wouldn't be so interested in having a terminal open and sending commands into it. But maybe someone else would be.

your use case is consistent, i guess i'm just getting greedy

do you need that redir? it creates portability issues with e.g. fish

I doubt it, I was copying from another adapter.

Greedy is good, I like being pushed 🙂 I'm learning a lot about viml from helping you.