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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
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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: