Kitty keyboard protocol

Rio terminal implements Kitty keyboard protocol. It is enabled by default.

use-kitty-keyboard-protocol = true

How it works?

Note: All the information of this page was retired from: sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol

There are various problems with the current state of keyboard handling in terminals. They include:

• No way to use modifiers other than ctrl and alt

• No way to reliably use multiple modifier keys, other than, shift+alt and ctrl+alt.

• Many of the existing escape codes used to encode these events are ambiguous with different key presses mapping to the same escape code.

• No way to handle different types of keyboard events, such as press, release or repeat

• No reliable way to distinguish single Esc key presses from the start of a escape sequence. Currently, client programs use fragile timing related hacks for this, leading to bugs, for example: neovim #2035.

To solve these issues and others, kitty has created a new keyboard protocol, that is backward compatible but allows applications to opt-in to support more advanced usages.

You can see this protocol with all enhancements in action by running:

kitten show_key -m kitty

You can also run:

kitty +kitten show_key -m kitty

Below an example of Rio terminal with Kitty keyboard protocol by the following instructions (MacOS keyboard example).

• Press left shift, release shift
• Press right shift, release shift
• Press left command