Kitty

From Bitpost wiki

OpenGL hardware accelerated terminal that is SIGNIFICANTLY, IMPORTANTLY much faster than gnome-terminal on abtdev1 via SPICE.

Config

All config (colors, keyboard, much more...) is here, "self-documented":

development/config/common/home/m/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

ssh terminfo

When ssh'ing to a new machine, it will not "know" kitty by default.

When you can use ssh directly, use a kitten:

kitty +kitten ssh newplace

Or, to teach an ubuntu machine about it:

sudo apt install kitty-terminfo

Or, go manual by following this.

infocmp -a xterm-kitty | ssh myserver tic -x -o \~/.terminfo /dev/stdin

Now LOG OUT, log back in, and enjoy the speed of kitty.

Colors

I grabbed a couple nice themes from [ here], and put them here:

 💉 m@cast  [~/.config/kitty/kitty-themes/themes] ls
total 28K
-rw-rw-r-- 1 m m 629 Feb 26 15:41 3024_Day.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 m m 357 Feb 26 15:42 Solarized_Darcula.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 m m 357 Feb 26 15:42 Solarized_Dark.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 m m 629 Feb 26 15:44 Solarized_Dark_-_Patched.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 m m 395 Feb 26 15:43 Solarized_Light.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 m m 357 Feb 26 15:45 Ubuntu.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 m m 629 Feb 26 15:46 WarmNeon.conf

Easy to apply, now that I allowed remote control:

kitty @ set-colors -a /home/m/.config/kitty/kitty-themes/themes/Solarized_Darcula.conf

To vet that they look good you can use:

colortest-16

Emacs seems to blow out its own shitty colors, eg for ruby comments in RED and quit-without-save warnings in BLUE. Switching to ne, dammit.

Auto-switch theme

DEV2 (Ubuntu 24.04) (kitty 0.32.2) has kitten theme available with its kitty version, and works dynamically, yay:

# MDM Shift to light terminal at 7am
0 7 * * * /usr/bin/kitten themes --reload-in=all Solarized Light

# MDM Shift to dark terminal at 5:30pm
# the first two suck at showing mouse-highlighted text...
# 30 17 * * * /usr/bin/kitten themes --reload-in=all Solarized Darcula
# 30 17 * * * /usr/bin/kitten themes --reload-in=all Ubuntu
30 17 * * * /usr/bin/kitten themes --reload-in=all Vaughn

CAST (Ubuntu 22.04) has an old kitty that is not working yet, sigh...

# MDM TODO Kitty is not applying themes to all, as expected; i don't have kitten theme support in old kitty of Ubuntu; kill -SIGUSR1 $KITTY_PID doesn't work either
# MDM Shift to light terminal at 7am
0 7 * * * /usr/bin/kitty @ set-colors -a /home/m/.config/kitty/kitty-themes/themes/Solarized_Light.conf

# MDM Shift to dark terminal at 5:30pm
30 17 * * * /usr/bin/kitty @ set-colors -a /home/m/.config/kitty/kitty-themes/themes/Solarized_Darcula.conf

Install

  • For now, I just install via ubuntu apt
sudo apt install kitty

NOTE on Ubuntu 22.04, it's an older version, and that sucks, as it is missing things like `kitty +kittens theme`. But latest is baked into Ubuntu 24.04, working on dev2 (see above). See the cron there for a daily auto-switch!

  • Add ctrl-shift-t shortcut in i3 config, starting it with correct path and using -1 (so one daemon is used for all shells, nice and fast).