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.