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> You have to transfer terminfo to all ssh servers because the kitty term does not exist there.

terminfo made sense decades ago when most people were connecting to 1 big centralised mainframe from a mix of random terminals. Now we have people using one (software) terminal to connect to many servers big and small. Requiring terminfo to be updated on the remote side is just nuts.

Kitty should just identify as xterm like every other terminal written in the last 20 years.

> Kitty should just identify as xterm like every other terminal written in the last 20 years.

This is not my experience at all. I'd say most of terminals, including modern ones, have unique terminfos and work miserably when it's not installed. Examples include ST, kitty, alacritty. On top of that we have terminal multiplexers like tmux and screen which provide their unique terminfos as well.

Then our experience diffs greatly. I can't remember the last time I saw a $TERM which wasn't 'xterm' or 'xterm-256color'.

I use rxvt-unicode which sets $TERM to "rxvt-unicode-256color," which is not recognized by a number of server to which I have to connect to from time to time.

There's a whole story about that, part of which is that at the time terminfo had to cater for old systems where there's a limit on the length of a terminal type name. But the same applies as for a missing kitty terminfo entry. The terminfo database is designed so that one can copy records around, and one can put them in a directory in one's home directory if one does not have administrative access to update the system database.

Debian systems have had an rxvt-unicode-256color entry for approaching 10 years, now. FreeBSD for about the same.

* https://sources.debian.org/src/ncurses/5.9-10/debian/rxvt-un...

* https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/termcap/termcap?r...

xterm-256color-italic user here (comments in text editor are italic).

I find myself in between. I've seen many terminfo's set to other things, which don't work, or have to be set every time I'm connecting to a new server which is too much extra work for every new server in my opinion. So I always just set it to xterm-256color and forget it

> Kitty should just identify as xterm like every other terminal written in the last 20 years.

You can do that by adding "term xterm-256color" to kitty.conf. The manual page warns against this but it seems to be mostly compatible. Kitty-specific extensions probably won't function remotely but it still serves as a nice portable terminal which can be configured with dotfiles.

The fact that the terminal is identified based on a TERM environment variable made sense if you want to support many hardware terminals which can't otherwise identify themselves and predate terminfo.

Maybe in the modern world applications could use an escape sequence to check for extensions on top of standard xterm?

1) kitty +kitten ssh myserver

That solves that.

As much as I like kitty, that shortcut is the only reason I've continued to use it for the past 18 months. Needing to manually fix it every time I connect to a new VM would've otherwise killed the appeal for me. `+kitten ssh` solves it nicely.

FWIW that doesn't copy user capabilities; for that use:

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

Could you explain this a bit more? I'm not sure what `ssh myserver tic -x -o \~/.terminfo /dev/stdin` is trying to do nor that it's correct as you typed it. Should `tic` be `-tic`?

tic is the TermInfo Compiler

The command on the left side of the pipe dumps the terminfo for "xterm-kitty" to stdout

The command on the right side launches ssh to "myserver" and executes tic to compile from stdin and output to the ~/.terminfo directory (which nurses/terminfo will search by default).

So basically it takes a local terminfo entry and copies it to the user-local terminfo path on the remote host.

The command will work for any other terminal too; just replace xterm-kitty with whichever entry you'd like copied.

Thanks!

I've found that doing TERM=xterm-256color works better for me because of default debian bashrc on remote servers.

it seems to break on sudo. Haven't found a fix for that yet

I just set up this alias:

    alias ssh='TERM="xterm-256color" ssh'

Generally works just fine for me. I tried the kitten approach but I had some issues as well.

thanks it helps

I wish I had known about this a year ago. A whole lot less to type than “mkdir -p ~/.terminfo/x ^D scp /usr/share/terminfo/xterm-kitty user@server:~/.terminfo/x/“

> You have to transfer terminfo to all ssh servers because the kitty term does not exist there.

Ouch, that's a dealbreaker. I remember having to set up my own termcap/terminfo entries decades ago, when 1200 bps was fast and I had few viable choices for terminal emulators, and all of them had their quirks. Hard pass.

You can work around that:

> echo "term xterm-256color" >> ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

Documentation advises against it, but what do they know? https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#opt-kitty.term

Your distro may carry a terminfo package for kitty in its main repo.

On Gentoo it's x11-terms/kitty-terminfo . On Ubuntu it's kitty-terminfo . You may want to add it to your default installations of the machines you ssh into, and for machines where you can't do that, there's 'kitty +kitten ssh' as others have already pointed out.

It's in Dickey terminfo, too, and has been since October 2018.

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-ki...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#t20181...

Goyal kitty isn't actually XTerm at all, of course, and the vanilla terminfo naming system comprises model names with suffixes. So only actual XTerm should have the prefix "xterm". In vanilla terminfo, kitty's terminal type is thus "kitty", with suffixes such as "-direct".

The PuTTY fork KiTTY, in contrast, corresponds with terminal types in the "putty-" family.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683277

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-pu...

> 2. By default mouse selection with double click + drag to select multiple lines is not normal. I believe this could be fixed but I haven't figured out how yet. (I could not re-create this right now, maybe it was fixed in some recent upgrade)

double click do word selection, triple click do line selection , don't know if this is configurable