I do something similar. I put any tty's I use in i3wm's scratch buffer and move it to the top. A key press then pops it up like a drop-down window without an animation.

I quite like Kitty compared to urxvt, which I was using before. Just looking at cmatrix, you can tell the difference. Smooth characters dropping down in kitty, sketchy 10fps on urxvt.

The only thing that bothers me is the theme being set in the config file. For urxvt, I put the theme separately in xresources and have a shell alias to change it (which then requires opening a new terminal, but that's what I use tmux for).

Maybe I can do something similar for Kitty, haven't really read the docs.