Kitty Terminal Basics + Cheatsheet

Intro

Kitty is a terminal emulator for UNIX-based systems that distinguishes itself by leveraging the power of the GPU to deliver faster and smoother screen rendering, making it a faster alternative to many other options. Kitty's key strengths are its low latency, support for modern features like image and Unicode rendering, and its ability to handle multiple windows and tabs efficiently.
Kitty is available to install both from brew and apt package managers.
brew install kitty
or
sudo apt-get install kitty

are enough to get you running with it.

Kitty Terminal Emulator Main Shortcuts

Tab Management

• New tab: Ctrl + Shift + T
• Close tab: Ctrl + Shift + Q
• Next tab: Ctrl + Shift + Right
• Previous tab: Ctrl + Shift + Left
• Move tab forward: Ctrl + Shift + .
• Move tab backward: Ctrl + Shift + ,

Layout Management

• Window split: Ctrl + Shift + Enter
• Close window: Ctrl + Shift + W
• Next window: Ctrl + Tab
• Previous window: Ctrl + Shift + Tab
• Move window forward: Ctrl + Shift + .
• Move window backward: Ctrl + Shift + ,

Font Adjustments

• Increase font size: Ctrl + Shift + '+'
• Decrease font size: Ctrl + Shift + '-'
• Restore font size to original: Ctrl + Shift + Backspace

Clipboard Operations

• Copy to clipboard: Ctrl + Shift + C
• Paste from clipboard: Ctrl + Shift + V

Searching within the Terminal

• Start search: Ctrl + Shift + F
• Find next: Ctrl + Shift + N
• Find previous: Ctrl + Shift + P

Miscellaneous

• Open link: Ctrl + Click
• Reload configuration file: Ctrl + Shift + F5
• Fullscreen toggle: F11

Customizing Kitty

Even though Kitty is much more lightweight than many of its alternatives, it still has more customization options than most of us will ever fiddle with. You can check these out with nano ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf or create it if it doesn't exist. The default configuration file has plenty of comments explaining the different options you have.

For instance, if I want to place my tabs at the top of the terminal screen (pretty much like every other terminal) instead of kitty's default bottom, and I want my tab separators to look like ones from a physical file, and I want to use the Mac ripoff of Comic Sans for the terminal font, I'll add this to my kitty.conf:

tab_bar_edge   top
tab_bar_style  slant
font_family    Chalkboard

Don't worry, if you are on Linux you can sudo apt-get install fonts-comic-neue. But I'm joking, this kind of font looks awful on a terminal, I've tried. However, the Ubuntu Mono font makes a mac look like a friendlier environment.

But don't worry: you can still have a more joyful web-browsing experience by rendering Comic Sans everywhere.