Change Kitty terminal color-scheme

One of the more persistant complaints about the Kitty terminal emulator is the inability to reload configuration. While you can’t change every option at runtime, you can change most display properties on fly if you enable remote control first. After this small tweak you can change color schemes, window padding, and font sizes on demand in a single, or all windows; current, and future.

❯ kitty @ --help
Usage: kitty @ [options] command ...

Control kitty by sending it commands. Set the allow_remote_control option to
yes in kitty.conf for this to work.

After enabling allow_remote_control, we can make use of any of the kitty @ set-<cmd> … commands.

This is what my kitty directory looks like. Normally I use a dark mode theme (gruvbox.dark.conf), but as my eyes get tired I’ll switch over to my light theme (gruvbox.light.conf).

~/.config/kitty
❯ exa -T
.
├── colors
│  ├── gruvbox.dark.conf
│  ├── gruvbox.light.conf
│  └── snazzy.conf
├── diff.conf
└── kitty.conf

kitty @ set-colors --all --configured ~/.config/kitty/colors/gruvbox.light.conf

Voilà! --all changes all windows as the name implies, dropping this flag makes the command only target the current window. --configured makes the configuration sticky, and will affect all new windows in this instance.

You can take this to the next level and create an interactive CLI script to choose your color scheme. My next post will be on how to create interactive CLI tools using just FZF!

header="press <enter> to enable colorscheme, <C-c> to exit."
bindings='enter:execute-silent(kitty @ set-colors {})'
preview='bat {}'
find ~/.config/kitty/colors/ -name '*.conf'
fzf --header "$header" --bind "$bindigs" --preview "$preview"

Here it is in action.

If you use fish shell you can copy the function below to have a color scheme toggle with auto completion

# ~/.config/fish/functions/kitty-colorscheme.fish
function kitty-colorscheme -a colorscheme
  kitty @ set-colors --all --configured ~/.config/kitty/colors/$colorscheme.conf
end

set -l colorschemes (fd 'conf' ~/.config/kitty/colors | rg $HOME'/.config/kitty/colors/(.*)\.conf' --replace '$1')

complete -c kitty-colorscheme --no-files --require-parameter --arguments "$colorschemes"