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Comment by Systemerror7A69 | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow, I did not expect not only that many interesting changes, but also that many which seem actually specifically useful to me - very cool to read!

I love kitty, have used it for a long while now and pretty happy, except for that one thing about ssh xterm - but even that is mostly minor.

Really cool to see such active development of an already perfectly capable and working software.

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Putting the following in my ~/.ssh/config fixed all ssh-related issues I had with kitty.

  Host *
    SetEnv TERM="xterm-256color"

Yes! That was it, exactly. Thank you, I wasn't able to check my home computer at the time of writing my last comment.

I've had so many issues with SSH that I ended up ghosttying kitty.

Fixed with a single alias or a single ssh config entry.

Ghostty made that obvious in the documentation for me. I haven't looked at the kitty docs, so Idk if they do as well.

If you mean the `alias ssh="kitty +kitten ssh"` then no, it's not fixed at all.

For example pikvm exists with read-only mounted filesystem. Having to dive into the details to figure out that the issue is kitty trying to write a file to make some obscure terminal features work doesn't strike me as good design.

`alias ssh="TERM=xterm-256color ssh"` fixes it but isn't mentioned in the docs.

> TERM=xterm-256color ssh

Yep, i switched to kitty a few months ago and Claude dug around and found the solution external to the docs. The developer is very opinionated about how he thinks you should use Kitty.

It’s actually fixed, for everything, with a single kitty config line which tells it to use xterm-256color as the terminal type.

I respect the man’s ideological correctness, but it’s not 1982 anymore and nobody is going to add more terminal types.

Doesn't `kitten ssh` solve the problem?

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/

Doesn't sound like it would work if connecting to a locked down server. However, the problem OP described is easily solved, for ghostty and kitty, by a single line in your local ssh config.

I have the same SSH qualms. I still use it because there's not much better for what I need.

I believe I got rid of most of the issues with some .ssh setting which simply uses the normal xterm I believe. I can't check right at this moment, but apparently, simply using xterm and not the xterm-xkitty or what it's called does not actually make much problems when ssh-ing into a machine - not in my case at least.

It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.

I currently just use this in my .zshrc:

alias ssh="kitty +kitten ssh"

sshpass() { TERM=xterm-256color command sshpass "$@"; }

Could also alias sshpass differently but I mostly use that for embedded devices where I just want a simple shell anyways.

The alternative you mean is in ~/.ssh/config:

Host *

    SetEnv TERM="xterm-256color"

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