Configuring Kitty
I love the Kitty terminal emulator for its speed! Ever since I started doing more work in the terminal, it became painfully clear to me that the standard terminal.app on Mac and even iTerm2 (although an amazing product!) were not cutting it anymore for me in terms of speed.
However, since I started using Kitty, I noticed how used I was to some of the shortcuts that “just work” when using terminal.app and iTerm2. In this short post we’ll go over some configuration settings to make Kitty behave more like iTerm2 and have the best of both worlds!
What we’ll be configuring
cmd+ arrow keys for jumping to beginning or end of the line.alt+ arrow keys for jumping between words.- Only vertical splits by default
- Switching between Tabs (Kitty calls them Windows)
by using
cmd+ 1-9 numeric keys - Some visual tweaks
Relevant config
1# don't draw extra borders, but fade the inactive text a bit
2active_border_color none
3inactive_text_alpha 0.6
4
5# tabbar should be at the top
6tab_bar_edge top
7tab_bar_style separator
8tab_separator " ┇"
9
10# open new split (window) with cmd+d retaining the cwd
11map cmd+d new_window_with_cwd
12
13# open new tab with cmd+t
14map cmd+t new_tab_with_cwd
15
16# new split with default cwd
17map cmd+shift+d new_window
18
19# switch between next and previous splits
20map cmd+] next_window
21map cmd+[ previous_window
22
23# clear the terminal screen
24map cmd+k combine : clear_terminal scrollback active : send_text normal,application \x0c
25
26# jump to beginning and end of word
27map alt+left send_text all \x1b\x62
28map alt+right send_text all \x1b\x66
29
30# jump to beginning and end of line
31map cmd+left send_text all \x01
32map cmd+right send_text all \x05
33
34# Map cmd + <num> to corresponding tabs
35map cmd+1 goto_tab 1
36map cmd+2 goto_tab 2
37map cmd+3 goto_tab 3
38map cmd+4 goto_tab 4
39map cmd+5 goto_tab 5
40map cmd+6 goto_tab 6
41map cmd+7 goto_tab 7
42map cmd+8 goto_tab 8
43map cmd+9 goto_tab 9
See the full config in my Dotfiles and see all available configuration options here.
Cheers! 🐈