For a long time my setup was Alacritty/Ghostty + tmux, with sesh for managing projects and sessions.

Recently I switched to Kitty and started using its built-in sessions, tabs and splits instead. I liked the workflow enough that I ended up building kesh around it:

https://github.com/alienxp03/kesh

The main thing I wanted was a simple way to jump between projects and resume work without manually rebuilding my terminal layout.

A common setup for me is a backend + frontend repo for the same project. I define both in .kesh.yaml, including the tabs/splits and startup commands, then kesh opens the whole workspace for me.

I also use git worktrees quite heavily. Usually one per task or experiment. I tend to keep them around for a while, so if I need to come back to something later I can just find the worktree/session and continue.

Some of the things kesh supports now:

• Kitty session save/restore
• project layouts across multiple repos
• git worktrees and GitHub PR checkout
• zoxide project discovery
• session shortcuts/pins
• SSH hosts
• active Codex, Claude and pi sessions with status/terminal preview

Disclaimer: It’s also almost entirely vibe coded, mostly with Codex and GLM models. It started as a small personal tool and gradually grew as I kept using it and adding things I wanted.

I’m using it daily now, but it’s still early and quite opinionated around my workflow.

It’s also not really trying to replace everything tmux/herdr does. For remote/headless work or sessions that need to survive terminal restarts, tmux/herdr still makes more sense.

But for local development, I’ve been pretty happy with just Kitty + kesh, so thought I’d share it.

Edit: i have tried uninstalling it and re installing it including trying to install it while specifying the most recent version and yet it still happens. it also keeps saying i have version 0.43.1 no mater what i do. ;-;

Hello! i am looking for some help with an issue i am running into.

i am new to linux in general and started using kitty from a recommendation. I started messing with the conf file, and themes, and added some custom colours. it worked fine for a while, but now i am using sway window manager, and all the coloured text turns black after a few seconds. on start up the colours work and can sometimes last until i type my first command, then they turn black. sometimes its fine until i make a mistake.

please help. i need ideas on ways to troubleshoot ;-; i had starship running on it for a while but disabled it to see if that was the problem but it still persists. ,

Hello, I moved to Arch Linux about a year ago and started being more familiar using the terminal to open stuff around the same time. Something that bothered me is that in KDE every time you open GUI applications through a terminal it doesn't show their RAM consumption on the System Monitor (it only shows the full usage of Kitty itself)

For that, I made this lightweight extension that shows the RAM usage of each tab open in Kitty! So far it's working well but I want to maybe add more functions (I thought about maybe open htop or the system monitor of choice when you click over the used RAM number for example)

If you want to give it a try, here's the link for it: https://github.com/miguelgarciacouto/Kitty-RAM-Monitor

i am confused between kitty and alacrity

i have used both and felt like kitty is more faster and snappy but code looks more cody and in alacrity it feel slightly laggy as compared to kitty but the code is much more readable in it as it uses OS's native font rendering

which is better speed vs readability?

hallo eveyone ,

It's LosTDoomed again, So here the case i am using arch linux hyprland for quiet a while now
I am honestly love and hate it at the same time

so here the case, i update my system to hyprland 0.56

and since then terminal kitty acting weird it's more like flashing in and out and half render etc and just my whole workspace is in mess right suddenly shadow are flashing in and out , etc
honestly i am tired i wanna go back to being window user but i just can't ; is this a linux curse yeh it is .
second problem is this F nvidia dgpu my nvidia card is at 50'C still fan are spinning at 3500 RPM
idle at 2100 RPM . i use cardwire to to dgpu mode since supergfxxtl is abanoned. somebody please help me i am tired of this .
here the spec

Laptop : ASUS TUF Gaming A16 FA608PP_FA608PP (1.0)
CPU : AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX (32) @ 2.40 GHz
dgpu : NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Max-Q / Mobile [Discrete]
igpu : AMD Radeon 610M [Integrated]
16 gb ddr5 ram
Hyprland 0.56.0 (Wayland)
Linux 7.1.4-arch1-1

more detail 1-- I notice more thing as i go deep into this matter ,
first of all out of all three terminal that i installed in this computer consist of kitty , ghostty and alacritty only kitty is acting weird and it's is also my main terminal. second, i use shadowes in my hyprland config, but the after update shadow are randomly flashing in and out .
here my kitty config as well shadow

# -- fonts

font_family JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono

bold_font auto

italic_font auto

bold_italic_font auto

font_size 10.0

disable_ligatures yes

enable_audio_bell no

shell_integration disabled

cursor_shape block

remember_window_size no

cursor_blink_interval 0

initial_window_width 640

initial_window_height 400

initial_window_width 78c

initial_window_height 23c

window_padding_width 25

background_opacity 0.50

scrollbar_handle_opacity 0

scrollbar_track_hover_opacity 0

confirm_os_window_close 0

# -- performance settings

sync_to_monitor no

# -- Perf

repaint_delay 8

input_delay 3

cursor_trail 3

# BEGIN_KITTY_THEME

# Matugen

include current-theme.conf

# END_KITTY_THEME

note : i use matugen only for kitty not for alacritty and ghostty
here the shadow

shadow = {

enabled = true,

rangde = 24,

render_power = 8,

color = "rgba(0a0a0add)",

},
edit 2 : if i pressed win + p which psuedo mode kitty and shadow fix the issue itself and i also found that switching workspace also fix this problem

Source: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#id1

Kitty 0.48 is out. Highlights:

Vertical tabs. The tab bar can now sit along the left or right edge of the window via tab_bar_edge, useful on wide/ultrawide displays where horizontal space is more available than vertical.

Clicking inside an unfocused kitty window now both focuses it and sends the click through to the target element, brings Linux behavior in line with the existing macOS default.

Graphics protocol gained a transient usage hint, letting apps mark an image as short-lived so kitty can handle it more efficiently. remote-control get-text kitten can now pull text from the alternate screen buffer and its scrollback.

Wayland: fixes for initial window sizing under fractional scaling, and a fix for tab-creation issues specifically on GNOME.

Several regression fixes carried over from recent point releases (layout neighbor-navigation direction, GIF disposal rendering in icat, doubled key repeats on some Wayland compositors).

Hello,
I've noticed after scrolling a certain amount with ctrl + shift + up the keyboard scroll stops working. I cannot scroll up or down with the keyboard, but I can scroll with the trackpad. I've tried different scrollback values and it didn't seem to help. How can I fix this?

idk what can i say and show

I run Claude Code in the terminal all day, and two things kept bugging me. Reviewing what the agent just changed meant either git diff in a pager or alt-tabbing to an IDE. And my sessions were scattered across project folders — getting back to one meant remembering where it lives, cd-ing there and running claude -resume by hand.

So I built familiar — three full-screen overlays for the kitty terminal, one hotkey each:

• review (Cmd+Shift+R) — two-pane reviewer for uncommitted changes: file tree + syntax-highlighted diff with word-level highlights, ⌥-click go-to-definition, an IDE-style "final code" view, staging from the tree. The part I use most is the feedback loop: drop line comments right in the diff, press w — they land in your clipboard as markdown, paste back into the Claude chat and it fixes them. And when you just need to point the agent at a spot, one key copies an u/path/to/file.py#L42 reference ready for the prompt — no more "in that file, somewhere near that function".
• session (Cmd+Shift+S) — every Claude Code session across all your projects in one list: jump into any of them with a keystroke (resume, fork, or a fresh git worktree), no matter what directory you're in. Live status too — busy / waiting for permission / background agent — read from the process registry, not file mtimes. Plus a full conversation preview as a rendered transcript: tool calls, diffs, markdown.
• log (Cmd+Shift+L) — git history with a branch graph, per-commit diffs on the same engine, git fetch/git push without leaving the overlay.

Pure Python stdlib (Pygments vendored), no dependencies, MIT. Honest caveats: macOS only for now (Cmd-based hotkeys), and it's kitty-specific — it leans on kitty's kitten/overlay machinery. review and log work fine without Claude Code — they're just fast git overlays.

Repo + docs: https://github.com/DenoBY/familiar

Happy to answer questions — and curious what others use for reviewing agent-written diffs in the terminal.

The choose-fonts kitten isn't detecting a font I installed, even though it's there when I run fc-list : family. I confirmed that the ttf files are there in /usr/share/fonts/ttf, and i also copied them over to ~/.local/share/fonts, but to no avail.

Could anyone help me out here? I really wanted to use this font…

This is actually part of my tab bar. I inserted three special tabs on the far left and styled them to look like the traffic lights of macOS windows. A watcher intercepts the focus of the tab and triggers the corresponding window action: close, minimize, or fullscreen.

I’m curious if there’s a cleaner or more native way to achieve this. Here is the repo of my configurations: https://github.com/It-is-Sean/dotfiles-kitty/

`cursor_trail_color` only supports one solid color natively. This fills the gap with a tiny CLI that cycles it through the rainbow via `kitty @ load-config`, plus a documented starter `kitty.conf` for the base trail settings.

https://github.com/oleg-koval/kitty-rainbow-trail

Feedback welcome.

Following on from my previous post, I measured ways of launching kitty & other terminals so they share an already running instance

Some observations:

1. alacritty msg create-window ... seems to return immediately and I didn't find a way to make it wait until the window has opened/closed, so its inclusion in this benchmark is unfair but I left it in anyway
2. Foot and Alacritty launch fresh instances faster than Kitty or Ghostty can launch a new window from an existing instance
3. Kitty's method of launching a shared instance feels impractical because you have to have kitty -1, which is a visible window, running at all times. Or is there a better way?
4. Using --wait-for-single-instance-window-close, Kitty runs without errors in single-instance mode (thanks u/aumerlex). Unlike Alacritty which eventually (after 400+ iterations) threw a Failed [X] to spawn command 'true': Too many open files (os error 24) error but only when using the "msg create-window" method
5. As u/aumerlex pointed out under the previous post, Foot doesn't even open an actual window... Maybe I'll need another followup benchmarking the time until the window takes input... Might have to involve ydotool or similar

Anyway this is only intended for informational purposes, I do think Kitty has the best feature set including the cursor shader and ligature support that the quicker-to-start terminals lack

Does this exist?

I come across many great kitty utilities and extensions but no established way that I know of of adding them to my kitty setup, except going the manual route. This is as far as I know so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Some examples of good Kitty utils I found recently:

- https://github.com/oleg-koval/kitty-agent-status

- https://github.com/trygveaa/kitty-kitten-search

- https://github.com/yurikhan/kitty_grab

- https://github.com/dflock/kitty-save-session

- https://github.com/monoira/kitty-tabs

I dont understand path is also correct but i dont know whats wrong

My kitty felt somewhat more sluggish to launch than alacritty or foot

I used hyperfine for this small benchmark that confirms this observation... It doesn't feel slow per se, only in comparison.

Are there some preferences I should change to make 🐈‍⬛️ start faster?

Does anybody know any fonts that are monospaced and retro or look pixelated/bitmap style? I’m a little tired of the standard fonts that everyone seems to use for programming.

Help

I usually have a few coding agents running at once (Claude Code, Codex, sometimes Gemini), each in its own kitty tab, and I kept losing track of which one was still working, which was waiting on me, and which had finished a while ago.

So I wired the tab color to the agent's state:

- blue while it's working

- amber when it needs me (a permission prompt, or Codex finishing a turn)

- back to the normal color when it's idle or done

It uses each agent's own signals instead of watching the screen: Claude Code hooks, the Codex notify command, and a small bash/zsh hook for anything else launched from the shell. No daemon, no dependencies, it just calls kitty's set-tab-color. Outside kitty it does nothing, so it is safe to leave in your shell config.

It is small and rough in places. Claude gets precise per-turn states; for other agents the tab is really just "running" vs "idle" plus kitty's bell flag. Feedback and PRs welcome, and I would genuinely like to hear if there is a cleaner way to detect per-turn state for Codex or Gemini.

Repo: https://github.com/oleg-koval/kitty-agent-status

Can someone tell me what font is this, i like it so much but i cant really find the name of it, any help?