Design philosophy¶ kitty is designed for power keyboard users. To that end all its controls work with the keyboard (although it fully supports mouse interactions as well). Its configuration is a simple, human editable, single file for easy reproducibility (I like to store configuration in source control). The code in kitty is designed to be simple, modular and hackable. It is written in a mix of C (for performance sensitive parts) and Python (for easy hackability of the UI). It does not depend on any large and complex UI toolkit, using only OpenGL for rendering everything. Finally, kitty is designed from the ground up to support all modern terminal features, such as unicode, true color, bold/italic fonts, text formatting, etc. It even extends existing text formatting escape codes, to add support for features not available elsewhere, such as colored and styled (curly) underlines. One of the design goals of kitty is to be easily extensible so that new features can be added in the future with relatively little effort.

Tabs and Windows¶ kitty is capable of running multiple programs organized into tabs and windows. The top level of organization is the Tab. Each tab consists of one or more windows. The windows can be arranged in multiple different layouts, like windows are organized in a tiling window manager. The keyboard controls (which are all customizable) for tabs and windows are: Scrolling¶ Action Shortcut Scroll line up ctrl+shift+up (also ⌥ + ⌘ + ⇞ and ⌘ + ↑ on macOS) Scroll line down ctrl+shift+down (also ⌥ + ⌘ + ⇟ and ⌘ + ↓ on macOS) Scroll page up ctrl+shift+page_up (also ⌘ + ⇞ on macOS) Scroll page down ctrl+shift+page_down (also ⌘ + ⇟ on macOS) Scroll to top ctrl+shift+home (also ⌘ + ↖ on macOS) Scroll to bottom ctrl+shift+end (also ⌘ + ↘ on macOS) Tabs¶ Action Shortcut New tab ctrl+shift+t (also ⌘ + t on macOS) Close tab ctrl+shift+q (also ⌘ + w on macOS) Next tab ctrl+shift+right (also ^ + ⇥ and ⇧ + ⌘ + ] on macOS) Previous tab ctrl+shift+left (also ⇧ + ^ + ⇥ and ⇧ + ⌘ + [ on macOS) Next layout ctrl+shift+l Move tab forward ctrl+shift+. Move tab backward ctrl+shift+, Set tab title ctrl+shift+alt+t (also ⇧ + ⌘ + i on macOS) Windows¶ Action Shortcut New window ctrl+shift+enter (also ⌘ + ↩ on macOS) New OS window ctrl+shift+n (also ⌘ + n on macOS) Close window ctrl+shift+w (also ⇧ + ⌘ + d on macOS) Next window ctrl+shift+] Previous window ctrl+shift+[ Move window forward ctrl+shift+f Move window backward ctrl+shift+b Move window to top ctrl+shift+` Focus specific window ctrl+shift+1 , ctrl+shift+2 ... ctrl+shift+0 (also ⌘ + 1 , ⌘ + 2 ... ⌘ + 9 on macOS) (clockwise from the top-left) Additionally, you can define shortcuts in kitty.conf to focus neighboring windows and move windows around (similar to window movement in vim): map ctrl + left neighboring_window left map shift + left move_window right map ctrl + down neighboring_window down map shift + down move_window up ... You can also define a shortcut to switch to the previously active window: map ctrl + p nth_window - 1 nth_window will focus the nth window for positive numbers and the previously active windows for negative numbers. You can define shortcuts to detach the current window and move it to another tab or another OS window: # moves the window into a new OS window map ctrl + f2 detach_window # moves the window into a new Tab map ctrl + f3 detach_window new - tab # asks which tab to move the window into map ctrl + f4 detach_window ask Similarly, you can detach the current tab, with: # moves the tab into a new OS window map ctrl + f2 detach_tab # asks which OS Window to move the tab into map ctrl + f4 detach_tab ask Finally, you can define a shortcut to close all windows in a tab other than the currently active window: map f9 close_other_windows_in_tab

Other keyboard shortcuts¶ Action Shortcut Copy to clipboard ctrl+shift+c (also ⌘ + c on macOS) Paste from clipboard ctrl+shift+v (also ⌘ + v on macOS) Paste from selection ctrl+shift+s Increase font size ctrl+shift+equal (also ⌘ + + on macOS) Decrease font size ctrl+shift+minus (also ⌘ + - on macOS) Restore font size ctrl+shift+backspace (also ⌘ + 0 on macOS) Toggle fullscreen ctrl+shift+f11 (also ^ + ⌘ + f on macOS) Toggle maximized ctrl+shift+f10 Input unicode character ctrl+shift+u Click URL using the keyboard ctrl+shift+e Reset the terminal ctrl+shift+delete Pass current selection to program ctrl+shift+o Edit kitty config file ctrl+shift+f2 Open a kitty shell ctrl+shift+escape Increase background opacity ctrl+shift+a>m Decrease background opacity ctrl+shift+a>l Full background opacity ctrl+shift+a>1 Reset background opacity ctrl+shift+a>d

Layouts¶ A layout is an arrangement of multiple kitty windows inside a top-level OS window. You can create a new window using the ctrl+shift+enter key combination. Currently, there are six layouts available: Fat -- One (or optionally more) windows are shown full width on the top, the rest of the windows are shown side-by-side on the bottom

Grid -- All windows are shown in a grid

Horizontal -- All windows are shown side-by-side

Splits -- Windows arranged in arbitrary patterns created using horizontal and vertical splits

Stack -- Only a single maximized window is shown at a time

Tall -- One (or optionally more) windows are shown full height on the left, the rest of the windows are shown one below the other on the right

Vertical -- All windows are shown one below the other By default, all layouts are enabled and you can switch between layouts using the ctrl+shift+l key combination. You can also create shortcuts to select particular layouts, and choose which layouts you want to enable/disable, see Layout management for examples. The first layout listed in enabled_layouts becomes the default layout. For more details on the layouts and how to use them see Layouts.

Kittens¶ kitty has a framework for easily creating terminal programs that make use of its advanced features. These programs are called kittens. They are used both to add features to kitty itself and to create useful standalone programs. Some prominent kittens: icat Display images in the terminal diff A fast, side-by-side diff for the terminal with syntax highlighting and images Unicode Input Easily input arbitrary unicode characters in kitty by name or hex code. Hints Select and open/paste/insert arbitrary text snippets such as URLs, filenames, words, lines, etc from the terminal screen. Panel Draw a GPU accelerated dock panel on your desktop showing the output from an arbitrary terminal program. Clipboard Copy/paste to the clipboard from shell scripts, even over SSH. You can also Learn to create your own kittens.

Configuring kitty¶ kitty is highly configurable, everything from keyboard shortcuts to painting frames-per-second. For details and a sample kitty.conf , see the configuration docs.

Remote control¶ kitty has a very powerful system that allows you to control it from the shell prompt, even over SSH. You can change colors, fonts, open new windows, tabs, set their titles, change window layout, get text from one window and send text to another, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless. See the tutorial to get started.

Startup Sessions¶ You can control the tabs, window layout, working directory, startup programs, etc. by creating a "session" file and using the kitty --session command line flag or the startup_session option in kitty.conf . For example: # Set the window layout for the current tab layout tall # Set the working directory for windows in the current tab cd ~ # Create a window and run the specified command in it launch zsh # Create a window with some environment variables set and run # vim in it launch env FOO=BAR vim # Set the title for the next window title Chat with x launch irssi --profile x # Create a new tab (the part after new_tab is the optional tab # name which will be displayed in the tab bar, if omitted, the # title of the active window will be used instead) new_tab my tab cd ~/somewhere # Set the layouts allowed in this tab enabled_layouts tall, stack # Set the current layout layout stack launch zsh # Create a new OS window new_os_window # set new window size to 80x25 cells os_window_size 80c 25c # set the --class for the new OS window os_window_class mywindow launch sh # Make the current window the active (focused) window focus launch emacs

Mouse features¶ You can hold down ctrl + shift and click on a URL to open it in a browser.

You can double click to select a word and then drag to select more words.

You can triple click to select a line and then drag to select more lines.

You can right click to extend a previous selection.

You can hold down ctrl + alt and drag with the mouse to select in columns (see also rectangle_select_modifiers ).

Selecting text automatically copies it to the primary clipboard (on platforms with a primary clipboard).

You can select text with kitty even when a terminal program has grabbed the mouse by holding down the shift key (see also terminal_select_modifiers ).

Font control¶ kitty has extremely flexible and powerful font selection features. You can specify individual families for the regular, bold, italic and bold+italic fonts. You can even specify specific font families for specific ranges of unicode characters. This allows precise control over text rendering. It can come in handy for applications like powerline, without the need to use patched fonts. See the various font related configuration directives in Fonts.

The scrollback buffer¶ kitty supports scrolling back to view history, just like most terminals. You can use either keyboard shortcuts or the mouse scroll wheel to do so. However, kitty has an extra, neat feature. Sometimes you need to explore the scrollback buffer in more detail, maybe search for some text or refer to it side-by-side while typing in a follow-up command. kitty allows you to do this by pressing the ctrl+shift+h key-combination, which will open the scrollback buffer in your favorite pager program (which is less by default). Colors and text formatting are preserved. You can explore the scrollback buffer comfortably within the pager. Additionally, you can pipe the contents of the scrollback buffer to an arbitrary, command running in a new window, tab or overlay, for example: map f1 launch -- stdin - source = @screen_scrollback -- stdin - add - formatting less + G - R Would open the scrollback buffer in a new window when you press the F1 key. See ctrl+shift+h for details. If you wish to store very large amounts of scrollback to view using the piping or ctrl+shift+h features, you can use the scrollback_pager_history_size option.

Multiple copy/paste buffers¶ In addition to being able to copy/paste from the system clipboard, in kitty you can also setup an arbitrary number of copy paste buffers. To do so, simply add something like the following to your kitty.conf : map f1 copy_to_buffer a map f2 paste_from_buffer a This will allow you to press F1 to copy the current selection to an internal buffer named a and F2 to paste from that buffer. The buffer names are arbitrary strings, so you can define as many such buffers as you need.

Marks¶ kitty has the ability to mark text on the screen based on regular expressions. This can be useful to highlight words or phrases when browsing output from long running programs or similar. To learn how this feature works, see Marks.