Kitty Sessions

Kitty is my terminal emulator of choice right now. Before that it was Warp and before that, iTerm2.

I have many different products that I maintain in my day-to-day and it is very convenient to be able to quickly open an environment that has everything I need. For example, when I work on D3M I want:

• One tab open in my local git repo
• Another tab open with multiple kitty windows:
  • Rails server
  • Sidekiq
  • Redis
  • Webpack
• Launch Zed with the repo as the active project
• Ensure I’m running the right version of postgres
• Start the elasticsearch container in docker

That is a lot of stuff to start and need running to be ready to begin working.

Warp had something called Launch Configurations to help with this, which allows you to use YAML to define a Launch Configuration that, when envoked, will open multiple tabs and run specified commands in each tab. iTerm2 also has an equivalent feature for this. Here is how to do it in Kitty.

Kitty Startup Sessions

Startup Session Documentation

Here is an abbreviated version of my D3M startup session:

new_tab Terminal
cd <PATH_TO_PROJECT>
launch --hold --title "D3M" zed .

new_tab Server
layout fat
cd <PATH_TO_PROJECT>
launch --title "D3M" --hold bin/rails s
launch --hold bundle exec sidekiq
launch docker start dde51da5de7bb4a1f3c0ad83b1d43634d776b6b0563d3b5c28b876967c1253bc

This gets saved in a file somewhere. Could be your ~/.config/kitty folder. And you launch it by running this command in your terminal:

open -a kitty.app -n --args --session ~/.config/kitty/d3m --single-instance

Note, that the --single-instance option is use to make sure the new OS window that is created is part of the same Kitty instance. If you do not provide this option then when the new window opens you will not be able to get back to the old window using Tab+`.

Explaining the Example Startup Session

So what is everything in that startup session doing? Let’s take a look.

new_tab Terminal creates a new tab named “Terminal”

cd <PATH_TO_PROJECT> sets the current working direction of the tab to the path.

launch --hold --title "D3M" zed . creates a new kitty window in the tab and launches zed .. --title defines that the OS Window should show “D3M” as the title when that tab is active. --hold prevents the kitty window from closing with the zed . command returns control to the terminal.

layout fat sets the layout for the current tab. You can check out the Layout documentation for more info.

launch docker start dde51da5de7bb4a1f3c0ad83b1d43634d776b6b0563d3b5c28b876967c1253bc runs the specified docker container and because I didn’t provide the --hold option, the kitty window is closed immediately after.

Hope that’s enough to set up some of your own Startup Session so you can easily switch between projects as well.