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.

References#

• Offical on kitty conf: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/overview/#configuring-kitty
• Copy text on select.
• Copy and paste in Kitty.
• Use option as meta key.