kitty + zsh + powerlevel10k = ✨ aesthetics ✨

Who doesn’t like a good looking terminal and useful layouts and keymaps? This has always been my goal since I started using linux as main OS.

I have used lots of different terminals, plugins and settings over the years but I think now I achieved the glory with my current setup:

setup

Let’s have a look to the configuration.

What do I use?

Terminal: Kitty
Shell: zsh
zsh config management: Oh my Zsh!
zsh theme: powerlevel10k
editor: neovim

Configuration

Terminal

To achieve a clean look in the terminal, I changed the opacity of kitty, removed the window title bar, and changed margins. Here the configuration needed:

background_opacity 0.76
draw_minimal_borders yes
window_padding_width 2
window_border_width 0
hide_window_decorations yes
titlebar-only yes
active_border_color none

I have also added changes for the tabs bar in order to make it look minimalist:

tab_bar_edge top
tab_bar_background none
tab_bar_style powerline
tab_powerline_style slanted
tab_title_template "{fmt.fg.c2c2c2}{title}"

active_tab_title_template "{fmt.fg._fff}{title}"
active_tab_foreground #fff
active_tab_font_style bold-italic
active_tab_background #8631B4

inactive_tab_foreground #c2c2c2
inactive_tab_background #8631B4

In order to move quick between splits I added the following mappings:

map cmd+shift+up neighboring_window up
map cmd+shift+left neighboring_window left
map cmd+shift+right neighboring_window right
map cmd+shift+down neighboring_window down

powerlevel10k

There is not much to mention here since I have used the powerlevel10k script to configure it. Once you install powerlevel10k it should init the configuration wizard. If you want to re-configure do so by running p10k configure in your terminal.

You can check my powerlevel10k config file here.

neovim

Plugins:

vim-airline

In this case, I got rid of many highlights background colors

highlight LineNr ctermbg=none
highlight Normal ctermbg=none
highlight NonText ctermbg=none
highlight SignColumn ctermbg=none
highlight VertSplit ctermbg=none ctermfg=98 cterm=none

I have also setup a color column to show a visual limit at 100 chars

set colorcolumn=100
highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=93

My vim-airline config goes like this:

let g:airline_theme='selenized_bw'

" Show git branch
let g:airline#extensions#branch#enabled=1

let g:airline#extensions#hunks#enabled=0
let g:airline_powerline_fonts=1
let g:airline_detect_spell=0

" Short version for modes
let g:airline_mode_map = {
      \ '__'     : '-',
      \ 'c'      : 'C',
      \ 'i'      : 'I',
      \ 'ic'     : 'I',
      \ 'ix'     : 'I',
      \ 'n'      : 'N',
      \ 'multi'  : 'M',
      \ 'ni'     : 'N',
      \ 'no'     : 'N',
      \ 'R'      : 'R',
      \ 'Rv'     : 'R',
      \ 's'      : 'S',
      \ 'S'      : 'S',
      \ ''     : 'S',
      \ 't'      : 'T',
      \ 'v'      : 'V',
      \ 'V'      : 'V',
      \ ''     : 'V',
      \ }

That’s it! The setup is fairly simple and the results are quite good.

You can have a look at all my config and dotfiles in here.

PS: this article has its source on github. I’m using a github action to publish it to different platforms. Read more {{#if medium}} here {{/if}} {{#if devto}} here {{/if}}

👽