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Comment by memco | Hacker News Reader

I'm also a macOS Kitty user. The config did take a minute to get used to, but the docs are pretty clear and it's really nice to be able to add the config to your dotfiles repo and have it available on all machines. My favorite feature though is the auto layout: it's really nice to be able to quickly switch to different layouts without having to manually move things and also not have to worry if something is going to fit into the space I have. The perf is nice too!

One thing I never figured out was how to properly set the terminal when on remote machines: it defaults to xterm-kitty, which led to problems trying to run nano on those servers. The only thing I dislike is the look of the tabs: compared to the OS native tabs it's a bit underwhelming, but they work fine.

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For servers that have older versions of ncurses, you can run this command from kitty to install the xterm-kitty terminfo files on the remote host:

    kitty +kitten ssh user@host

Thanks! Seems to resolve the term issue albeit at the cost of having to remember to use the kitten instead of standard SSH.

Once the terminfo files are installed, unless the target system has restored from a backup or something, you can just revert to using plain ssh.

Or you could lobby your sysadmins to update terminfo past version 20181017 and use 'term kitty' in your config. It's too bad the people involved can't agree on using either "xterm-kitty" (Kitty author's preference) or "kitty" (ncurses maintainer's preference) for the TERM value.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879#issuecomment-...

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

Solution is in the FAQ: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-...

I just add the following to my kitty.conf and have never had any issues with TERM:

    term xterm-256color

It's usable but i had a lot of issues. Copy pasty looses newlines, redraw issues in mutt, etc. It is absolutely "forbidden" and unsupported by the kitty author to use any other term than xterm-kitty.

The author offers a solution in the FAQ: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-...

Kitty normally identifies itself as 'xterm-kitty' (in the environment variable TERM). The problem is that most terminal programs don't know that terminal type and use some less featured fallback. Most modern terminal implementations use a workaround it by pretending to be 'xterm-256color', with varying degrees of actual compatibility. (That's also what changing term in kitty.conf does).

Kitty's author really wants you to use the traditional solution of telling (programs on) the remote host what your terminal is capable of and how to use the capabilities by installing a new terminfo entry in ~/.terminfo/x/xterm-kitty on the remote side, which is what `kitty +kitten ssh [remotehost]` does. (It needs to be done only once, unless the file gets wiped on the remote end).

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