Make Kitty look like Xfce Terminal

I love Xfce. In fact, Xfce is the reason I am still using X11, despite being one of Wayland’s earliest contributors. But two weeks ago I made the switch from Xfce4-Terminal to Kitty.

Kitty is… “opinionated” in certain regards, but surprisingly standards conformant. The “kitten” program that bundles all the “built-in” functionality of this terminal emulator allows for amazing customizability. And yet, if you just start kitty, it looks, well, a bit rough to someone with two decades of Xfce4-Terminal socialization:

In this article I will list the configuration settings that I use to make kitty more familiar and maybe one or two other Xfce expats might find them useful, too.

Generating a new config

Kitty stores its config file at ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf. This file does not exist by default. If you start kitty and press Ctrl+Shift+F2, an extensively annotated default config file will be generated and opened in your favorite text editor. Use that as your base.

Font size

Kitty defaults to 11pt. Maybe it’s just me and age taking a toll on my eyes, but I need at least 12pt to read comfortably:

font_size 12.0

Tab bar

I want my tab bar at the top, and looking more like actual tabs:

tab_bar_edge top
tab_bar_style slant

I also have taken a liking to having the tab bar always visible, even if there is only one tab:

tab_bar_min_tabs 1

And while we are at it, don’t overwrite the tab title by default:

shell_integration no-title

New tabs in current directory

map kitty_mod+enter launch --cwd=current --location=vsplit
map kitty_mod+t new_tab_with_cwd

Scroll bar

I want the scroll bar to be always visible, not only on mouse-over or scrolling, and I like it a little bit wider, say a full display cell instead of the default half:

scrollbar always
scrollbar_width 1

Next and previous tabs

Kitty defaults to Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab for cycling through tabs. I have built a lot of muscle-memory for Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn over the years, so let’s add these bindings:

map ctrl+page_down next_tab
map ctrl+page_up previous_tab

Sound

Pet peeve. I don’t want any “bing”, “boing”, “wush”, “shwich” or “dong” in my terminal. Draw a little bell emoji in the tab title if you need my attention:

bell_on_tab "🔔 "
enable_audio_bell no

Bonus: 🇩🇪-friendly window switching

Kitty comes with built-in window support, effectively tmux but with support from the terminal emulator, and it’s awesome. Only fly in the ointment: Cycling between the windows is mapped to Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+], which on a German keyboard are mapped behind AltGr+8 and AltGr+9, making the combo awkward. I have remapped this to Alt+Left and Alt+Right:

map alt+left previous_window
map alt+right next_window