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Comment by psanford | Hacker News Reader

I tried using kitty recently. Its really neat, until you try to sshing somewhere. If the remote system doesn't have kitty in its terminfo, nothing works. Kitty's "solution" to this is to use a custom ssh wrapper, which I'm sorry, is not an acceptable solution. A simple solution would be to let users override what TERM gets set to, but they refuse to allow this on some moral ground.

Maybe I'll try it again in a few years when its in more terminfo packages.

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I just type 'export TERM=xterm' whenever I log onto one of these systems (I use tmux-direct as my $TERM). It seems like Debian 12 has a lot of newer terminfos these days in the default install, and I've tried to upgrade most places I ssh to that. Like our CI system can take a Docker image as the place where your code runs; so instead of using the default one from 2018 or whatever, I just made my own that has all these niceties.

(I use kitty on Mac and Windows Terminal on Windows, but it ends up not mattering because I'm always in tmux, so that's the terminfo that remote machines need. I never bothered setting up 24 bit color though, so I have no idea if that would work with my setup. I switched to TERM=tmux-direct to get italic fonts in Emacs running on Linux inside tmux inside an SSH session from Windows Terminal. It works!)

Yeah that's silly. TERM is as broken as web user-agents. You just have to accept that and `export TERM='xterm-compatible, like xterm-256color, like gnome-terminal'` or whatever :-D

The distros I use (debian, arch) have a kitty-terminfo package. First thing I install when I ssh into a machine. My terminal settings just work and I don't have to do archeology on decades of obscure terminal escape sequences.

Why not just install Kitty’s terminfo file on the remote server? This is quick and easy to do, and only needs to be done once.

That is what kitty's "custom SSH wrapper" does, if I understand correctly. Each time you ssh into a server, it will copy kitty's terminfo file if it doesn't already exist.

I use the ssh kitten, it works fine.

Oh, that’s nice. I don’t see why anyone would be against using that.

Servers in workplaces are often ephemeral. It's easy enough to write provisioning code that updates the system terminfo database, but it needs to be written, tested, reviewed, and deployed. Speaking of deploys, how are your Q1 OKRs shaping up?

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