Kitty, a terminal emulator for advanced users with the keyboard

about kitty emulator

In the next article we are going to take a look at Kitty. Is about a free, open source terminal emulator that uses little system resources. This software has a type of rendering that makes it run faster. It also includes support for extensions, with which you can enable some advanced functions in the terminal. It also comes with mouse support, unique coding, true color, and focus tracking, among many other features.

Kitty is designed for advanced keyboard users. For this reason all its controls work from the keyboard, although it also fully supports mouse interactions. Its configuration is done from a simple file. The code in this application is designed to be simple and modular. It is written in a combination of C and Python. It doesn't rely on any large and complex UI toolkit, using just OpenGL to render it all.

Kitty is designed from the ground up to admit all the modern features of a terminalsuch as unicode, true color, bold / italic fonts, text formatting, etc. One of the design goals of this emulator is to be easily extendable, so that new features can be added in the future with relative ease.

Some of the general characteristics of Kitty

Split screen with terminal cheater

  • Works on Gnu / Linux and macOS.
  • This emulator offloads the rendering to the GPU, thus seeking a lower system load and obtaining a smooth displacement.
  • Supports all modern single-ended featuresl: graphics / images, unicode, true color, mouse protocol, focus tracking, parenthetical paste, and various protocol extensions for new terminals.
  • Supports the mosaic multiple terminal windows, one next to the other with different designs, without the need to use an additional program like tmux.
  • Can be controlled from scripts or from the shell command prompt, even via SSH.
  • It has a framework for Kittens, which is a small terminal program that can be used to extend emulator functionality.
  • Admits startup sessions. This allows you to specify the window / tab layout, working directories, and programs to run at startup.
  • You have multiple copy / paste buffers.
  • This emulator is capable of running multiple programs organized in tabs and windows. The top level of organization is the tab. Each tab consists of one or more windows. Windows can be arranged in different layouts. The keyboard controls, which are customizable for tabs and windows, can be consulted in the project website.

Install kitty terminal emulator on Ubuntu

Downloading the latest version

For install this emulator on Ubuntu We will have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and type the following command:

download kitty installer

curl -L https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin

This will install the latest version of this terminal emulator on the Ubuntu system. Will be installed at the location ~ / .local / kitty.app / bin / kitty. If we go to this folder, we will see the file on which we must double click to open the emulator.

executable kitty file

If something goes wrong or you just don't want to run the installer, you can download and install kitty manually from the versions page on GitHub. Gnu / Linux users, we will only have to download the tarball and extract it into a directory. The kitty executable will be in the bin subdirectory.

Integration with the desktop

launcher for kitty

If you are interested in having the icon of this emulator appear on your system, among all the others, you will have to add the file kitty.desktop. The details of the following procedure may need to be adjusted for one or another particular desktop, but it should work for most major desktop environments.

To start we will create symlink to add kitty to PATH (assuming ~ / .local / bin is in your PATH):

ln -s ~/.local/kitty.app/bin/kitty ~/.local/bin/

Let put the kitty.desktop file somewhere where the operating system can find it:

cp ~/.local/kitty.app/share/applications/kitty.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

To finish, let's update the path to the kitty icon in the kitty.desktop file with the following command:

sed -i "s/Icon\=kitty/Icon\=\/home\/$USER\/.local\/kitty.app\/share\/icons\/hicolor\/256x256\/apps\/kitty.png/g" ~/.local/share/applications/kitty.desktop

It can get more information about this terminal emulator and its documentation in the project website.


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