Terminal Config

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A real, working kitty configuration — macOS. A Ghostty-flavoured look, Ghostty-style splits and rounded powerline tabs, and fixes for driving Cmd/Ctrl shortcuts on a Russian keyboard layout. It ships in the repo under config/ and is optional: the kittens run on any kitty.

These are personal Cmd-centric macOS bindings with Cyrillic key duplicates. Fork it, read it, adapt it — don't adopt the whole thing blindly. What to change for your machine and layout is in Adapting it.

The look

• Palette — Ghostty's default dark theme, taken from ghostty +show-config --default (foreground/background + the 16 ANSI colors), in ghostty.conf.
• Font — JetBrains Mono 12.
• Tabs — top, rounded powerline "pill" style (tabs.conf).
• Splits — Ghostty-style panes (splits.conf).
• Titlebar — tinted to the terminal background (macOS).

Requirements

• macOS — the config uses macos_titlebar_color, hide_macos_app, minimize_macos_window, Cmd-based bindings, and a macOS-specific keyboard fix (see The Cmd+W fix).
• kitty — tested on 0.47.
• JetBrains Mono installed — otherwise kitty silently falls back to another font and the intended look changes. Change font_family in ghostty.conf to use your own.
• Optional: the kittens from this repo — wire them in separately with familiar enable --kittens (see Installation).

Install

The easy path is the familiar helper: familiar enable --all pulls in this config (as terminal.conf) plus the kittens. See Installation.

To use just this terminal config by hand, copy the files and restart kitty:

cp config/*.conf ~/.config/kitty/

cp overwrites same-named files (notably kitty.conf) — back up your existing config first if you have one.

The theme, splits, tabs and layout work right away. Add the kittens separately with familiar enable --kittens — it generates their maps with the absolute paths kitty needs.

What's in each file

Grouped into keys/ (shortcuts + layout) and look/ (appearance); the two hubs (kitty.conf, terminal.conf) stay at the root.

File	What it sets
kitty.conf	Thin entry for the manual cp path — just include terminal.conf.
terminal.conf	Look-only hub — pulls in the others in order (restored-defaults first, so its clear_all_shortcuts runs before anything is mapped). This is what familiar enable --all includes.
keys/restored-defaults.conf	clear_all_shortcuts + a curated macOS Cmd set: font size (Cmd+=/-/0), new window/tab (Cmd+N/T/Enter), tab nav (Cmd+Shift+[ ]), rename tab (Cmd+Shift+I), clipboard (Cmd+C/V), search (Cmd+F), clear screen (Cmd+K/L), scroll, quit/hide/minimize (Cmd+Q/H/M), edit/reload config (Cmd+, / Cmd+Ctrl+,).
look/ghostty.conf	The look: Ghostty's default dark palette + JetBrains Mono 12 + macOS titlebar tinted to background. Needs the font installed.
keys/russian-ctrl.conf	Remaps Ctrl+<Cyrillic> to the same control code as the Latin key, by physical ЙЦУКЕН→QWERTY position — so Ctrl+C/V/… keep working while typing Russian.
keys/splits.conf	Ghostty-style panes: Cmd+D / Cmd+Shift+D split, Cmd+Shift+arrows move focus, Cmd+Shift+Enter zoom (stack), Cmd+W close pane, Cmd+Shift+W close tab.
look/tabs.conf	Top rounded powerline "pill" tabs + colors, Cmd+1…9 go to tab.
look/darcula.conf	Optional JetBrains Darcula theme (familiar enable --theme darcula). Loaded after ghostty.conf and tabs.conf, so it overrides their colors (terminal palette and tab bar); the font, the titlebar and the pill shape of the tabs stay.

Note: clear_all_shortcuts wipes all of kitty's built-in shortcuts, including the cross-platform Ctrl+Shift (kitty_mod) defaults — only the curated Cmd set above comes back. restored-defaults.conf is a snapshot of kitty's defaults frozen at a kitty version; re-check it after a major upgrade.

Russian keyboard layout

Two pieces make hotkeys work while the Russian layout is active:

• russian-ctrl.conf maps every Ctrl+<Cyrillic> to the control code of the Latin key in the same physical position (Ctrl+с → Ctrl+C, …).
• splits.conf carries Cyrillic duplicates of the Cmd bindings (D→в for split); the kittens' duplicates (S→ы, R→к, L→д) are generated by familiar. Tab switching uses number keys (Cmd+1…9), which are layout-independent — no duplicate needed.

Don't use a Russian layout? Delete russian-ctrl.conf (and drop its include from terminal.conf) and remove the Cyrillic duplicate map lines — the Latin bindings are unaffected.

The Cmd+W fix

The one genuinely non-obvious part. On macOS, kitty's built-in Cmd+W → close_tab is sticky: it has an ASCII fallback that pre-converts the physical W key — which types ц on the Russian layout — back to w and grabs it, so Cmd+W closed the tab instead of the pane, even in Russian.

• clear_all_shortcuts yes is the only way to drop that default; then restored-defaults.conf brings back just the Cmd shortcuts I actually want.
• splits.conf maps Cmd+W to close_window with --allow-fallback=ascii, which converts the physical W to Latin w and matches reliably on any layout.
• A direct map cmd+ц does not work — the macOS input method swallows it (observed with kitty --debug-keyboard). The ASCII fallback is the robust path.

--allow-fallback=ascii only triggers for non-ASCII input, so Latin layouts (Dvorak, Colemak, …) are unaffected.

Adapting it

• Not on macOS? Remove the macos_* options in ghostty.conf and rebind Cmd to Ctrl/Super throughout; the Cmd+W fix is macOS-only.
• No Russian layout? See Russian keyboard layout.
• Different font? Change font_family in ghostty.conf.
• Terminal only? familiar enable --terminal wires in just this config, without any kittens (or use the manual cp above).

Writing your own theme (terminal palette + kitten highlighting): see Themes.