A Complete Tutorial for Kitty to Fish with vifm

A good terminal tool can speed up your workflow, and make your life much easier. Here I give a complete tutorial of installing the kitty terminal, and configuring the fish shell and vifm manager on mac.

1. kitty

(1) install kitty on mac

>> curl -L https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin

(2) set kitty as the default terminal tool

To set kitty as the default application, you need to install a plug-in called “RCDefaultApp.prefPane”. You can download it from my github repository.

>> git clone https://github.com/JakeJing/kittyconfig.git
>> sudo mv kittyconfig/RCDefaultApp.prefPane /Library/PreferencePanes/

This will add an icon of “default apps” in your system preferences, and allow you to set the default terminal tools in this way (system preferences — default Apps — click the “default Apps” — URLS — x-man-page — set the default application as “kitty”).

(3) add shortcut (shift-cmd-1) to open a new kitty terminal window

You can also create a keyboard shortcut to open a new terminal window in the current folder by setting System Preferences — Keyboard — Shortcuts — Services — New kitty wondow here. I am using the keybinding (shift-cmd-1) for open a new kitty window.

(4) download template kitty.conf

>> wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JakeJing/kittyconfig/master/kitty.conf -P ~/.config/kitty/

2. fish

(1) install fish shell

Here I provide a bash script for installing fish and vifm in my github repository. If everything works well, you should be able to type fish and vifm in your terminal, and switch to fish shell and vifm.

>> wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JakeJing/fishconfig/master/settings_all_mac.sh
>> bash
>> chmd +x settings_all_mac.sh
>> source settings_all_mac.sh

(2) set fish as the default shell

You need to add the fish shell in your /etc/shells. If it doesn’t work due to restricted writing permission, you can try “sudo nano /etc/shells”, and manually add the “/usr/local/bin/fish” at the last line.

sudo sh -c 'echo /usr/local/bin/fish >> /etc/shells'

Restart the terminal and set the fish shell as the default.

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish

3. vifm

The previous bash script also include the installation and configurations for vifm. Now you can type vifm on your terminal, and navigate between different directories.

Useful links:

• https://github.com/JakeJing/kittyconfig
• https://github.com/JakeJing/fishconfig