docs/overview.rst
|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), Python (for easy
extensibility and flexibility of the UI) and Go (for the command line
:term:kittens). 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.
.. include:: basic.rst
|kitty| is highly configurable, everything from keyboard shortcuts to painting
frames-per-second. Press :sc:edit_config_file in kitty to open its fully
commented sample config file in your text editor. For details see the
:doc:configuration docs <conf>.
You can quickly browse all available mappable actions by pressing
:sc:command_palette.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
conf
.. _layouts:
A :term:layout is an arrangement of multiple :term:kitty windows <window>
inside a top-level :term:OS window <os_window>. The layout manages all its
windows automatically, resizing and moving them as needed. You can create a new
:term:window using the :sc:new_window key combination.
Currently, there are seven 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 :sc:next_layout key combination. You can also create shortcuts to select
particular layouts, and choose which layouts you want to enable, see
:ref:conf-kitty-shortcuts.layout for examples. The first layout listed in
:opt:enabled_layouts becomes the default layout.
For more details on the layouts and how to use them see :doc:the documentation <layouts>.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
layouts
kitty has a powerful framework for scripting. You can create small terminal
programs called :doc:kittens <kittens_intro>. These can be used to add features
to kitty, for example, :doc:editing remote files <kittens/remote_file> or
:doc:inputting Unicode characters <kittens/unicode_input>. They can also be
used to create programs that leverage kitty's powerful features, for example,
:doc:viewing images <kittens/icat> or :doc:diffing files with image support <kittens/diff>.
You can :doc:create your own kittens to scratch your own itches <kittens/custom>.
For a list of all the builtin kittens, run kitten in kitty, or to browse
some of the more prominent ones, see :ref:see here <kittens>.
Additionally, you can use the :ref:watchers <Watchers> framework
to create Python scripts that run in response to various events such as windows
being resized, closing, having their titles changed, etc.
Finally, there is remote control which allows you to control kitty from anywhere, even across a network! See below for more about remote control.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
kittens_intro
|kitty| has a very powerful system that allows you to control it from the
:doc:shell prompt, even over SSH <remote-control>. You can change colors,
fonts, open new :term:windows <window>, :term:tabs <tab>, set their titles,
change window layout, get text from one window and send text to another, etc.
The possibilities are endless. See the :doc:tutorial <remote-control> to get
started.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
remote-control
You can control the :term:tabs <tab>, :term:kitty window <window> layout,
working directory, startup programs, etc. by creating a session file and using
the :option:kitty --session command line flag or the :opt:startup_session
option in :file:kitty.conf. You can also easily switch between sessions with
a keypress. See :doc:sessions for details.
kitty can be told to run arbitrary programs in new :term:tabs <tab>,
:term:windows <window> or :term:overlays <overlay> at a keypress.
To learn how to do this, see :doc:here <launch>.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
launch
Ctrl+Alt to select from clicked
point to end of line.Ctrl+Alt and drag with the mouse to select in
columns.Ctrl+Shift to open the output of the
clicked on command in a pager (requires :ref:shell_integration)Shift keyAll these actions can be customized in :file:kitty.conf as described
:ref:here <conf-kitty-mouse.mousemap>.
You can also customize what happens when clicking on :term:hyperlinks in
kitty, having it open files in your editor, download remote files, open things
in your browser, etc. For details, see :doc:here <open_actions>.
Additionally, various bits of the kitty UI itself work with the mouse. You can drag and drop tabs in the tab bar to re-order them or move them from one OS Window to another, or even pop them out into a new OS Window. You can drag window borders to resize windows. You can double click on empty regions of the tab bar to create new tabs or double click on an existing tab to rename it.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
open_actions
|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
:ref:conf-kitty-fonts.
.. _scrollback:
|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. |kitty|
displays an interactive :opt:scrollbar along the right edge
of the window that shows your current position in the scrollback. You can click
and drag the scrollbar to quickly navigate through the history.
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 :sc:show_scrollback shortcut, which will open the scrollback buffer in
your favorite pager program (which is :program: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 :term:window, :term:tab or
:term:overlay. For example::
map f1 launch --stdin-source=@screen_scrollback --stdin-add-formatting less +G -R
Would open the scrollback buffer in a new :term:window when you press the
:kbd:F1 key. See :sc:show_scrollback <show_scrollback> for details.
If you want to use it with an editor such as :program:nvim to get more powerful
features, see for example, kitty-scrollback.nvim <https://github.com/mikesmithgh/kitty-scrollback.nvim>__ or kitty-grab <https://github.com/yurikhan/kitty_grab>__
or see more tips for using various editor programs, in :iss:this thread <719>.
If you wish to store very large amounts of scrollback to view using the piping
or :sc:show_scrollback <show_scrollback> features, you can use the
:opt:scrollback_pager_history_size option.
kitty has the ability to integrate closely within common shells, such as zsh <https://www.zsh.org/>, fish <https://fishshell.com> and bash <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/>__ to enable features such as jumping to
previous prompts in the scrollback, viewing the output of the last command in
:program:less, using the mouse to move the cursor while editing prompts, etc.
See :doc:shell-integration for details.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
shell-integration
.. _cpbuf:
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 :file:kitty.conf::
map f1 copy_to_buffer a map f2 paste_from_buffer a
This will allow you to press :kbd:F1 to copy the current selection to an
internal buffer named a and :kbd:F2 to paste from that buffer. The buffer
names are arbitrary strings, so you can define as many such buffers as you need.
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 :doc:marks.
.. toctree:: :hidden:
marks