Over the past month, I transitioned from WezTerm to the Kitty terminal, thanks to a friend’s recommendation. After daily use with tmux and Neovim, I can say it’s been a game-changer—responsive, fast, and effortlessly configurable.

Kitty leverages the GPU to enhance performance, delivering a smooth and seamless experience:

The main goals for kitty performance are user perceived latency while typing and “smoothness” while scrolling as well as CPU usage. kitty tries hard to find an optimum balance for these. To that end it keeps a cache of each rendered glyph in video RAM so that font rendering is not a bottleneck. Interaction with child programs takes place in a separate thread from rendering, to improve smoothness. Parsing of the byte stream is done using vector CPU instructions for maximum performance. Updates to the screen typically require sending just a few bytes to the GPU.

You can check out the performance benchmarks in Kitty’s documentation, and while they certainly look impressive, I had to see it for myself. After using it, I can confirm—it lives up to the hype.

Configuration

Kitty uses .conf files for configurations this is mine:

# BEGIN_KITTY_THEME
# Solarized Osaka
include current-theme.conf
# END_KITTY_THEME

font_family FiraCode Nerd Font Mono Light
font_size 16
bold_font        auto
italic_font      auto
bold_italic_font auto


background_opacity 0.8
background_blur 50


macos_show_window_title_in none
macos_titlebar_color #1a1b26
macos_menubar_title_max_length 0
hide_window_decorations titlebar-only

I use FiraCode Mono Light font, enabled font ligatures, and added a touch of background opacity with blur for that extra visual appeal, along with a few tailored macOS settings to match my preferences.

Theme

If you know, you know. Solarized Osaka is a theme inspired by craftzdog - Takuya Matsuyama, a talented developer I’ve been following on YouTube and Twitter. I loved his theme’s color scheme so much that I created my own theme file for Kitty, as it’s not available in the default Kitty themes.

# vim:ft=kitty

## name: Solarized Osaka
## author: shagag
## license: MIT
## blurb: Precision colors for developers

background #1a1b26
foreground #c0caf5
cursor #c0caf5
selection_background #283457
color0 #002731
color8 #001e26
color1 #d01b24
color9 #bd3612
color2 #728905
color10 #465a61
color3 #a57705
color11 #52676f
color4 #2075c7
color12 #708183
color5 #c61b6e
color13 #5856b9
color6 #259185
color14 #81908f
color7 #e9e2cb
color15 #fcf4dc
selection_foreground #93a1a1

Simply copy the contents of the file above, and creat a current-theme.conf file inside the kitty .config directory. Don’t forget to gnu stow kitty and add to your github dotfiles repo!