I have several terminal emulators installed on my Mac: kitty, Alacritty and iterm2. When I start a Tmux session in Alacritty and try to create another tmux session in kitty, I noticed this strange error that I have never met before:
open terminal failed: missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-kitty
For clarity, kitty seems to use its own terminfo file called xterm-kitty, and
Alacritty and iterm2 both use the good-old xterm-256color.
The author of kitty claims that:
tmux does not support multiple terminfo. You will need to kill all existing tmux sessions and start a new one.
I find his claim to be partly true. If I create a session in Alacritty, I can not attach to this session or create new session in kitty. However, if I initially create a new session (before that, there is not tmux session running) in kitty, I can indeed attach to that session or create a new session in Alacritty.
My version info:
- kitty: 0.17.2
- Alacritty: 0.4.0
- Tmux: 3.1b
So my temporary solution is to kill all sessions in other terminal emulators if you want to use tmux in kitty.
Tmux error when sshing to remote server#
If you ssh to another server using kitty terminal and met this issue when
starting tmux on that server. The reason may be that xterm-kitty terminfo
file may not be available on that server. You can use the following command to
copy the terminfo file to the remote server as indicate
here:
kitty +kitten ssh myserver