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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

What kinds of problems? I've used tmux with kitty plenty and never noticed anything, but that's probably because I just didn't care to look.

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The one I encountered is color problem. I can never get xterm-256color works reliably and has to use screen-256color which supports lesser features such as italic.

Running btop within tmux using kitty also has color problems, but Alacritty also fails at that.

Colors in terminals are tough. There's the terminal, then the shell, then tmux, then vim, and you want all of their configs in concert even when you're switching between light and dark one or twice a day. Colors are tough in general. Even the browser color story kind of sucks. Dark reader goes a long way, but not enough

Right, I sort of understand that (not the details). I'm sympathetic to the kitty author, who explains why other terminals and tmux are doing things wrong, etc.

I guess it is especially messy in the terminal, reading a little bit into the issues and it just feels like a ton of legacy hacks between different implementations.

And comparing that to the browser is interesting. Both are "ubiquitous"—terminal emulator for cli/TUI, and browser for GUI. May be because of there generality / ubiquity, it is messy and impossible to "make it right".

I had a long battle with making kitty work with tmux. I settled on the following in ~/.tmux.conf, before moving to wezterm for good. Maybe it fixes things for you, too:

    set -g default-terminal xterm-256color
    set-option -sa terminal-overrides ',xterm-kitty:RGB'
    set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",xterm*:Tc:smcup@:rmcup@"
    set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",screen*:Tc:smcup@:rmcup@"
    set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",tmux*:Tc:smcup@:rmcup@"

I honestly don't know whether all are needed, or only some. But with these, it worked well for me.

I tried the first line and in some situations (specifically with some remotes, i.e. kitty -> ssh -> tmux with that 1st line) it still won't fix it.

I gave up kitty because the author obviously don't like tmux and is advising users not to use it. So it is more like a choice between kitty and tmux. Giving up kitty is easier for me in terms of features and time for retraining.

What's your reason to migrate from kitty to wezterm?

> What's your reason to migrate from kitty to wezterm?

My reason to no longer using kitty is simple: I don't like having to copy kitty's terminfo data to every single system I connect to in order to have my terminal work.

It's fine for those few systems I very often connect to, of course.

But I also connect to ephemeral systems, sometimes for a short session, and the toil and friction inherent in having to do that just isn't worth it.

Sure, "kitty +kitten ssh ..." can work in most people's scenarios. Didn't quite work in mine, due to various intricacies about my ssh setup - multiple ssh keys, handled mostly by ssh-ident.

wezterm Just Worked for me. As I got "back" to also using other systems like Windows and MacOS, it Just Worked there, too. No fiddling with terminfo, no fiddling with $TERM, either.

Happy days.

Your reasoning resonates with mine very much. I'll look at wezterm soon and hope it will works for me too.

> I don't like having to copy kitty's terminfo data to every single system I connect to in order to have my terminal work.

You can put LocalCommand directive in your ~/.ssh/config to scp something to the remote machine. I use it to have my .vimrc synced on all my systems.

> I tried the first line and in some situations (specifically with some remotes, i.e. kitty -> ssh -> tmux with that 1st line) it still won't fix it.

You likely need all of them ;-)

IIRC it "fixes" terminfo stuff "within tmux" for kitty regardless of what $TERM is set. Mind you, I was using the latest tmux at that time. tmux 3.2?

Here's the issue I had: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/3018

Looks like it should be fixed on a very recent tmux; otherwise this MIGHT help:

    set-option -as terminal-features ',xterm-kitty:RGB'

... or not.

I tried your solution using one remote server that I had trouble with before and it works! That's really great. This probably solves enough problems with kitty for me that I can use it until I find a better solution. (I am using Alacritty at the moment but it has other problems so that I have to use kitty as fall back for some situations.)

Thanks!

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