I used Tmux a lot in the past. On macOS I run Tmux in Alacritty. Recently I've replaced Alacritty + Tmux with Kitty. Having used Kitty for about a month, I find it's pretty awesome and can seamlessly switch to it with nearly the same set of keybindings as Tmux.

Why🔗

I once installed Kitty, but found it behaved odd with SSH and Tmux. So I kept using Tmux in Alacritty.

Recently, I read this thread by accident. The author of Kitty rant on Tmux and described it as horrible hack. I totally buy it. So I've stopped using Tmux on my local machine and replaced Tmux + Alacritty with Kitty.

Some nice features provided by Kitty:

• Integrate with shell: view last command output in less by Ctrl+Shift+g
• Edit remote files in an existing SSH session
• GPU accelerated
• Extensibility

How🔗

At first, I used Kitty's builtin keybinding. Then when I saw a colleague using Kitty + Tmux having issues copying text using tmux keybinding, I shared the above thread link to him and introduced the shell integration feature to him. He spent a few hours in the weekend to configure Kitty to mimic Tmux keybinding. This really helps a lot, since we can use Kitty on local machine but can't get rid of tmux on remote machines. But the keybindings are totally different which is error-prone to press keybindings.

He shared his configuration with me. But he only configured a few keys, and I used more Tmux keybindings. So I added some more Tmux keybindings to Kitty configuration. The whole configuration is here. The keybindings are copied from Tmux keybinding cheatsheet.

The result is pretty exciting, it covers all my keybinding usage in Tmux. Now I use the same set of tmux keybindings on local machine and remote VMs, locally use kitty, remotely use tmux with ctrl+b as keybinding prefix.

Bonous🔗

Kitty can be extended with kitten using Python. Below are some useful kittens.

SSH Kitten🔗

Set an alias for it: alias s="kitty +kitten ssh", then s my-vps-server can connect to my-vps-server.

Kitty supports reusing the existing SSH session. When in the SSH session window, invoke new_window_with_cwd would open a new SSH window with the existing SSH connection and cd into the same remote directory. This is very similar to running tmux on remote machine and then use tmux to open new pane.

I bind new_window_with_cwd to ctrl+a f (f is taken from fork which is easier to remember and not used by tmux keybinding).

After login to a remote machine using SSH kitten, I can also edit remote files using local $EDITOR by:

1. ls --hyperlink=auto
2. Hold Ctrl+Shift, then click the name of the file.
3. Press E to edit the file using local $EDITOR

Hints Kitten🔗

This is a very powerful kitten.

• ctrl+shift+p n: open path or filename followed by a colon
• ctrl+shift+p f: select a path or filename and then paste in terminal
• ctrl+shift+p y: open hyperlinks

Hyperlinked Grep Kitten🔗

After adding the following config to $HOME/.config/kitty/open-actions.conf

# Open any file with a fragment in vim, fragments are generated
# by the hyperlink_grep kitten and nothing else so far.
protocol file
fragment_matches [0-9]+
action launch --type=overlay vim +${FRAGMENT} ${FILE_PATH}

# Open text files without fragments in the editor
protocol file
mime text/*
action launch --type=overlay ${EDITOR} ${FILE_PATH}

Then run kitty +kitten hyperlinked_grep something to search something and then hold ctrl+shift to click the match to open it in vim.

Add an alias for it alias hg="kitty +kitten hyperlinked_grep"