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nix-config/home/base/gui/terminal/README.md
Ryan Yin 3bf1b986cf feat: upgrade nixpkgs stable to 25.11, update nixos-apple-silicon, gh… (#236)
* feat: upgrade nixpkgs stable to 25.11, update nixos-apple-silicon, ghostty, anyrun, etc
* fix: asahi-nixos - revert mesa to 25.2.6
* fix: disable gitui - it's broken on aarch64-darwin currently

---------

Signed-off-by: Ryan Yin <xiaoyin_c@qq.com>
2025-11-26 20:54:44 -06:00

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# Terminal Emulators
I used to spend a lot of time on terminal emulators, to make them match my taste, but now I found
that it's not worth it, **Zellij can provide a user-friendly and unified user experience for all
terminal emulators! without any pain**!
Currently, I only use the most basic features of terminal emulators, such as true color, graphics
protocol, etc. Other features such as tabs, scrollback buffer, select/search/copy, etc, are all
provided by zellij!
My current terminal emulators are:
1. kitty: My main terminal emulator.
1. to select/copy a large mount of text, We should do some tricks via kitty's `scrollback_pager`
with neovim, it's really painful: <https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/719>
2. foot: A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator.
1. foot only do the things a terminal emulator should do, no more, no less.
1. It's really suitable for tiling window manager or zellij users!
3. alacritty: A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator.
1. alacritty is really fast, I use it as a backup terminal emulator on all my desktops.
## 'xterm-kitty': unknown terminal type when `ssh` into a remote host or `sudo xxx`
> https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-get-errors-about-the-terminal-being-unknown-or-opening-the-terminal-failing-or-functional-keys-like-arrow-keys-don-t-work
> https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/config/term.html
kitty set `TERM` to `xterm-kitty` by default, and TUI apps like `viu`, `yazi`, `curses` will try to
search in the host's [terminfo(terminal capability data base)](https://linux.die.net/man/5/terminfo)
for value of `TERM` to determine the capabilities of the terminal.
But when you `ssh` into a remote host, the remote host is very likely to not have `xterm-kitty` in
its terminfo, so you will get this error:
```
'xterm-kitty': unknown terminal type
```
Or when you `sudo xxx`, `sudo` won't preserve the `TERM` variable, it will be reset to root's
default `TERM` value, which is `xterm` or `xterm-256color` in most linux distributions, so you will
get this error:
```
'xterm-256color': unknown terminal type
```
or
```
Error opening terminal: xterm-kitty.
```
NixOS preserve the `TERMINFO` and `TERMINFO_DIRS` environment variables, for `root` and the `wheel`
group:
[nixpkgs/nixos/modules/config/terminfo.nix](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.11/nixos/modules/config/terminfo.nix#L18)
For nix-darwin, take a look at <https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/wiki/Terminfo-issues>
### Solutions
Simplest solution, it will automatically copy over the terminfo files and also magically enable
shell integration on the remote machine:
```
kitten ssh user@host
```
Or if you do not care about kitty's features(such as true color & graphics protocol), you can simply
set `TERM` to `xterm-256color`, which is built-in in most linux distributions:
```
export TERM=xterm-256color
```
If you need kitty's features, but do not like the magic of `kitten`, you can manually install
kitty's terminfo on the remote host:
```bash
# install on ubuntu / debian
sudo apt-get install kitty-terminfo
# or copy from local machine
infocmp -a xterm-kitty | ssh myserver tic -x -o \~/.terminfo /dev/stdin
```