Switching terminals to Kitty

Photo by Jasper Boer on Unsplash

Introduction

Knowing your way around the terminal can make you much more productive as a programmer. As well as using essential tools for development such as Git and NPM/Yarn, there are many more commands that can speed up your workflow, especially when you can start making scripts to automate frequent or time-consuming tasks. This year I decided to make a concious effort to get more proficient at using the command line, which means I’ve been spending a lot more time in my terminal.

I took a look around in the wild for different terminals that I would be able to customise to my liking. Mainly I wanted to have a nice looking color theme and fonts, especially for programming.

I first stumbled across a terminal called Alacritty which I thought was cool since it’s a GPU-accelerated terminal editor. It touts that it’s the fastest terminal emulator in existence.

I used Alacritty for a few months, and while it sacrifices a lot of features that other terminals have, when combined with something like Tmux, you still get nice window/tab management to run multiple terminals at the same time. The thing that got me though was that I couldn’t get italic fonts to render properly, and I really wanted to use a font style like Wes Bos, especially since all my programming is done in the terminal now too.

Kitty Terminal

I then found another GPU based terminal emulator called Kitty. It has a lot more modern features like OpenType ligatures, which look awesome in programming languages like JavaScript. A common programming font that uses ligatures is Fira Code

What font ligatures look like in Fira Code

And also supports tiling multiple terminal windows side by side in different layouts without needing to use Tmux.

Installation

Getting started with Kitty was pretty easy if you’re using Ubuntu, just follow these steps: (If you’re not on Ubuntu, Kitty is cross-platform too so you should be able to find the equivalent installation method for your operating system online.)

1. Open your current terminal app and type the the following command to download the installer

curl -L https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin

This will install the latest version of Kitty into the ~/.local/kitty.app/bin/kitty location.

Now, to integrate with your desktop, so the app shows up in your list of apps do following:

1. ln -s ~/.local/kitty.app/bin/kitty ~/.local/bin/

2. cp ~/.local/kitty.app/share/applications/kitty.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

3. ~/.local/share/applications/kitty.desktop

Done. You should now see kitty in your apps.

Configuration

One thing that was real important for me was installing a nice font that would be nice to look at all day while I was programming.

Kitty makes it really easy to customize your font, and the font management is super powerful. You can select individual fonts for regular, bold, italic and bold italic. Simply create a new file in ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf and add the following lines along with any font you like. You can see a list of all your installed fonts by opening Font Manager.

font_family      Operator Mono Book
bold_font        Operator Mono Medium
italic_font      Operator Mono Book Italic
bold_italic_font Operator Mono Medium Italic

Operator Mono is a nice looking font, it’s the one Wes Bos uses - but he paid $200 for it and I wasn’t about to fork out that much money for a font. I found a font called Victor Mono that looks somewhat similar with the semi-connected cursive italics, and programming symbol ligatures (which Kitty supports).

An example of Victor Mono font

You can get it by following these steps:

1. [Download](https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/VictorMonoAll.zip) the font
2. Unpack the ZIP
3. Install the font by adding into the Font Manager application
4. Update your Kitty `kitty.config` file

My current kitty.config file looks like this:

font_family		Victor Mono Light
bold_font		Victor Mono Bold
italic_font		Victor Mono Italic
bold_italic_font	Victor Mono Bold Italic
adjust_column_width	120%

Conclusion

While writing this blog post I honestly wondered why I even switched terminals, was it just so I could pretend I was cool with a fancy new terminal? The terminal that ships with Ubuntu is pretty great too, but I think even just having support for ligatures and window management features makes it worth while for me.

I’ve only been using Kitty for a few days but it’s working out pretty great so far!

Happy Coding!