Kitty Terminal Usage and Commands

kitty - The fast, feature rich terminal emulator

About

The kitty terminal is run as GUI and controlled through a config file at ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf. This config file can include additional files (often in the same directory for ease, but absolute paths are supported). The config file is a custom, but simple format, and most functionality is exposed via mappings to kitty 'actions' or from the cli via the kitty cli and self contained actions known as kittens.

For example kitten @ ls will list all current os-windows, tabs and windows, with their foreground processes, ids etc. In fact all kitty behaviour can be controlled programmatically from kitten commands. See manpages and debugging below for more details.

Kitty's windowing model follows the hierarchy of 'os-window' > 'tabs' > 'windows', where the user may be running multiple 'os-windows' which maps to actual GUI instances managed by the operating system, and then each 'os-window' contains one or more tabs, which in turn has one or more 'windows' (which appear as 'splits' in the ui, allowing for side-by-side views within the same tab).

IMPORTANT: The 'os-windows' are managed by the operating system and so it is not possible (on macos) to programmatically move focus between os-windows, this means in practice the user will always have a single 'os-window' (though more may be spawned to create test instances or quick temporary views like viewing a config file).

Manpages

Kitty has local man pages and these can be searched faster by focusing the manpath: