This plugin is a port of Chris Toomey's vim-tmux-navigator plugin. When combined with a set of kitty key bindings and kittens, the plugin will allow you to navigate seamlessly between vim and kitty splits using a consistent set of hotkeys.
Important
This plugin requires kitty v0.30.0 or higher.
This plugin provides the following mappings which allow you to move between Vim panes and kitty splits seamlessly.
<ctrl-h>
→ Left<ctrl-j>
→ Down<ctrl-k>
→ Up<ctrl-l>
→ Right
If you want to use alternate key mappings, see the configuration section below.
If you don't have a preferred installation method, I recommend using vim-plug.
Assuming you have vim-plug
installed and configured, the following steps will
install the plugin:
Add the following line to your ~/.vimrc
file
Plug 'knubie/vim-kitty-navigator'
Then run
:PlugInstall
To configure the kitty side of this customization there are three parts:
Move both pass_keys.py
and get_layout.py
kittens to the ~/.config/kitty/
directory.
This can be done manually or with a vim-plug
post-update hook:
Plug 'knubie/vim-kitty-navigator', {'do': 'cp ./*.py ~/.config/kitty/'}
The pass_keys.py
kitten is used to intercept keybindings defined in your kitty conf and "pass" them through to vim when it is focused. The get_layout.py
kitten is used to check whether the current kitty tab is in stack
layout mode so that it can prevent accidentally navigating to a hidden stack window.
Add the following to your ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf
file:
map ctrl+j kitten pass_keys.py bottom ctrl+j
map ctrl+k kitten pass_keys.py top ctrl+k
map ctrl+h kitten pass_keys.py left ctrl+h
map ctrl+l kitten pass_keys.py right ctrl+l
By default vim-kitty-navigator
uses the name of the current foreground process to detect when it is in a (neo)vim session or not. If that doesn't work, (or if you want to support applications other than vim) you can supply a regular expression as a third optional argument to the pass_keys.py
call in your kitty.conf
file to match the process name.
map ctrl+j kitten pass_keys.py bottom ctrl+j "^.* - nvim$"
map ctrl+k kitten pass_keys.py top ctrl+k "^.* - nvim$"
map ctrl+h kitten pass_keys.py left ctrl+h "^.* - nvim$"
map ctrl+l kitten pass_keys.py right ctrl+l "^.* - nvim$"
Start kitty with the listen-on
option so that vim can send commands to it.
# For linux only:
kitty -o allow_remote_control=yes --single-instance --listen-on unix:@mykitty
# Other unix systems:
kitty -o allow_remote_control=yes --single-instance --listen-on unix:/tmp/mykitty
or if you don't want to start kitty with above mentioned command,
simply add below configuration in your kitty.conf
file.
# For linux only:
allow_remote_control yes
listen_on unix:@mykitty
# Other unix systems:
allow_remote_control yes
listen_on unix:/tmp/mykitty
Tip
After updating kitty.conf, close kitty completely and restart. Kitty does not support enabling allow_remote_control
on configuration reload.
You can provide a kitty remote control password
by setting the variable g:kitty_navigator_password
to the desired kitty
password, e.g.:
let g:kitty_navigator_password = "my_vim_password"
Tip
Mac users can learn more about command line options in kitty, from this link.
If you don't want the plugin to create any mappings, you can use the five
provided functions to define your own custom maps. You will need to define
custom mappings in your ~/.vimrc
as well as update the bindings in kitty to
match.
Add the following to your ~/.vimrc
to define your custom maps:
let g:kitty_navigator_no_mappings = 1
nnoremap <silent> {Left-Mapping} :KittyNavigateLeft<cr>
nnoremap <silent> {Down-Mapping} :KittyNavigateDown<cr>
nnoremap <silent> {Up-Mapping} :KittyNavigateUp<cr>
nnoremap <silent> {Right-Mapping} :KittyNavigateRight<cr>
Note
Each instance of {Left-Mapping}
or {Down-Mapping}
must be replaced
in the above code with the desired mapping. Ie, the mapping for <ctrl-h>
=>
Left would be created with nnoremap <silent> <c-h> :KittyNavigateLeft<cr>
.
By default vim-kitty-navigator
prevents navigating to "hidden" windows while in
stacked layout. This is to prevent accidentally switching to a window that is
"hidden" behind the current window. The default behavior can be overridden by
setting the g:kitty_navigator_enable_stack_layout
variable to 1
in your ~/.vimrc
let g:kitty_navigator_enable_stack_layout = 1
Warning
The latest version of this plugin requires kitty v0.30.0 or higher. This version introduced a new option to kitty @ focus-window
that allows focusing a neighboring window.
If you are not able to navigate around vim, try the following:
- Make sure you are using the latest version of Kitty.
- Make sure you are using the latest commit of
vim-kitty-navigator
- Add a print statement in
pass_keys.py
between line 7 and 8 like this:def is_window_vim(window, vim_id): fp = window.child.foreground_processes print(fp) return any(re.search(vim_id, p['cmdline'][0], re.I) for p in fp)
- Then run kitty in a debug mode:
kitty --debug-keyboard
- when the new window is opened, open up vim and some splits and try navigating around. When navigating your vim splits you should see some output similar to this:
The
KeyPress matched action: kitten [{'pid': 97247, 'cmdline': ['nvim', '.'], 'cwd': '/Users/matt/.config/kitty'}]
'cmdline': ['nvim', '.']
part will tell us the title of the vim window that we're using to match against in the script. Double check the regex inpass_keys.py
, or the regex you passed in tokitty.confg
with that title to make sure they match.