kitty

kitty is a fast, GPU-drawn terminal app. The config lives in ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf.

The installer copies the config but doesn’t install kitty — it’s a desktop app, so on a desktop without kitty you get a warning with the install command. On servers there’s no warning: you use kitty on your own computer and SSH from it.

Font and window

Setting	Value
Font	Hasklug Nerd Font Mono, 12 pt
Window size on open	120 × 32 characters, every time (remember_window_size no)

A Nerd Font is a programming font with thousands of extra icons added — prompts and tools use them for symbols like the git branch icon. If the font isn’t installed, kitty silently uses a fallback font and some icons show as boxes.

The installer installs it on desktops. It asks which Nerd Font you want (Hasklug, the default, is Hasklig with icons added) and, if you pick another one, writes that font’s name into kitty.conf while copying it. You can also pass --font=FiraCode and so on, or get fonts from nerdfonts.com.

Theme

include themes/lasik.conf

Lasik matches the author’s VSCode theme. A Catppuccin Mocha theme is in the repo too — swap the comment to use it. The installer copies both theme files to ~/.config/kitty/themes/.

Reload after editing: Ctrl+Shift+F5.

Splits (like tmux)

Keys	Action
Ctrl+Shift+\	split side by side
Ctrl+Shift+-	split top and bottom
Ctrl+Shift+H / J / K / L	move to the split left / down / up / right (Vim directions)

New splits open in the same folder as the current one (--cwd=current).

Layouts enabled: splits (for the splits above), stack (one window full-size) and tall (one big window plus a column).

These keys replace some kitty defaults

Keys	kitty’s default action	Still available with
Ctrl+Shift+H	show scrollback	— map another key to show_scrollback
Ctrl+Shift+J / K	scroll one line down / up	Ctrl+Shift+↓ / ↑
Ctrl+Shift+L	next layout	— map another key, e.g. map ctrl+shift+space next_layout
Ctrl+Shift+-	smaller font	Ctrl+Shift+Backspace resets the size
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Selecting text inside tmux

With tmux’s mouse mode on, kitty passes clicks to tmux, so normal drag-to-select doesn’t work. This config makes Shift+drag always select in kitty (single, double and triple click too).

Using kitty over SSH

kitty tells programs what it can do through the TERM variable: TERM=xterm-kitty. When you SSH into a server, that value comes along. If the server doesn’t know xterm-kitty, programs like nano, htop, less and clear fail with:

'xterm-kitty': unknown terminal type.

The server needs kitty’s terminfo — a small file describing kitty’s features. The installer adds it automatically (package kitty-terminfo) on Linux machines where kitty isn’t installed.

On a server where you can’t run the installer, nothing extra is needed when you connect from kitty: inside kitty, the ssh alias runs kitty +kitten ssh, which copies the terminfo over automatically.

Outside the dotfiles (or to do it by hand):

kitten ssh user@server          # copies the terminfo over automatically

or, as a quick workaround for one session:

TERM=xterm-256color ssh user@server