Let's try Kitty layouts¶

A terminal multiplexer...¶

As I spend a lot of my time in the terminal emulator, I find it useful to be able to display several shell sessions at once in the same window - so I can have one session running my backend app and one running the frontend one for example.

In order to do this I've been using the terminal multiplexer tmux for several years, and I've been quite happy with it.

...And a terminal emulator...¶

However, I've also been using the awesome terminal emulator Kitty for a while, and I have great respect for its author as they're also the developer behind the open source e-books management software Calibre - which is, like Kitty, a fine-tuned mix of C and Python code

And in Kitty's FAQ they say the following:

terminal multiplexers are a bad idea, do not use them, if at all possible. kitty contains features that do all of what tmux does, but better

Alright, let's trust them and give Kitty's layouts a try then!

...Let's drop tmux, and just use Kitty's layouts!¶

After having fiddled for a while with Kitty's config, here is the setup I ended up with:

# ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

# My default layout will be "splits". 
# (i.e. on-demand tmux-like panes, "windows" in Kitty's terminology)
# But I also want to be able to switch to "stack" in order to temporarily
# render the active window in full screen within Kitty: 
enabled_layouts splits,stack

# With "f1" I can toggle between the two layouts:
# i.e. with "f1" the windows I'm working in goes full screen, and pressing 
# "f1" again brings back the other windows.
map f1 toggle_layout stack

# With "f5" I can create a new window splitting the space used by the
# existing one, so that the two windows are placed one above the other:
map f5 launch --cwd=current --location=hsplit

# With "f6" I can create a new window splitting the space used by the 
# existing one, so that the two windows are placed side by side:
map f6 launch --cwd=current --location=vsplit

Main Kitty documentation pages I've used:

Using only Kitty feels faster indeed, in term of how the terminal emulator's UI reacts.

Now, I "just" (might take a while ) have to replace my previous mental map of keyboard shortcuts with the new one, and I should be good to go!