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.

References