Kitty Terminal Config on Mac
Contents
Changelog
- 2021-08-21: Update the part on how to open URLs since some options are removed.
Kitty is a fast and lightweight terminal emulator for Mac and Linux. In this post, I will summarize some of its settings.
We can download the kitty binary release from its GitHub release
page. After installation, its
config file is located at $HOME/.config/kitty/kitty.conf
.
How to copy and paste in Kitty terminal?
By default, to copy selected text to clipboard in Kitty, use the shortcut Ctrl+ Shift + C. To paste selected text, we can use mouse middle click.
We can also edit the Kitty config and add more shortcut for copy-pasting:
map cmd+c copy_to_clipboard
map cmd+v paste_from_clipboard
map shift+insert paste_from_clipboard
Most terminal emulators have this nice feature to copy the selected text to clipboard automatically. In Kitty, we can also do this by enabling the following option:
copy_on_select yes
How to open URLs?
Iterm2 has a feature to open a URL in default browser if you press Ctrl and click the URL link. In kitty, you can press Ctrl + Shift and then click the left mouse to open a URL.
If you are using the lastest version of Kitty (tested on kitty 0.23), you can also add the following kitty config:
mouse_map ctrl+left press ungrabbed,grabbed mouse_click_url
Tab configuration
By default, Kitty will show tab when tab number is above 1. The tab will be shown at the bottom of Kitty window. To change this behaviour, use the following setting:
tab_bar_edge top
Use option as alt key
By default, Option + LETTER
will input the corresponding Unicode characters
on macOS. So any shortcut starting with Option can not work
properly. To use Option as Alt, use the following config:
macos_option_as_alt yes
More documentation here.
How to change color schemes?
Kitty uses a list of colors for setting the color scheme. Unlike iterm2, we
need to manually change the color config inside kitty.conf
.
We can find a lot of color schemes or themes for Kitty on GitHub. To use these color themes, just copy the color definition to your Kitty config.
This repo also has a lot of Kitty themes for you to choose.