kitten-choose-fonts(1)

Name
kitten-choose-fonts - kitten Documentation

Overview

Terminal aficionados spend all day staring at text, as such, getting text rendering just right is very important. kitty has extremely powerful facilities for fine-tuning text rendering. It supports OpenType features <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features> to select alternate glyph shapes, and Variable fonts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_font> to control the weight or spacing of a font precisely. You can also select which font is used to render particular unicode codepoints <#opt-kitty.symbol_map> and you can modify font metrics <#opt-kitty.modify_font> and even adjust the gamma curves <#opt-kitty.text_composition_strategy> used for rendering text onto the background color.

The first step is to select the font faces kitty will use for rendering regular, bold and italic text. kitty comes with a convenient UI for choosing fonts, in the form of the choose-fonts kitten. Simply run:

            kitten choose-fonts

and follow the on screen prompts.

First, choose the family you want, the list of families can be easily filtered by typing a few letters from the family name you are looking for. The family selection screen shows you a preview of how the family looks.

Once you select a family by pressing the Enter key, you are shown previews of what the regular, bold and italic faces look like for that family. You can choose to fine tune any of the faces. Start with fine-tuning the regular face by pressing the R key. The other styles will be automatically adjusted based on what you select for the regular face.

You can choose a specific style or font feature by clicking on it. A precise value for any variable axes can be selected using the slider, in the screenshot above, the font supports precise weight adjustment. If you are lucky the font designer has included descriptive names for font features, which will be displayed, if not, consult the documentation of the font to see what each feature does.

The font specification syntax

If you don't like the choose fonts kitten or simply want to understand and write font selection options into kitty.conf yourself, read on.

There are four font face selection keys: font_family, bold_font, italic_font and bold_italic_font. Each of these supports the syntax described below. Their values can be of three types, either a font family name, the keyword auto or an extended key=value syntax for specifying font selection precisely.

If a font family name is specified kitty will use Operating System APIs to search for a matching font. The keyword auto means kitty will choose a font completely automatically, typically this is used for automatically selecting bold/italic variants once the font_family <#opt-kitty.font_family> is set. The bold and italic variants will then automatically use the same set of features as the main face.

To specify font face selection more precisely, a key=value syntax is used. First, let's look at a few examples:

            # Select by family only, actual face selection is automatic
            font_family family="Fira Code"
            # Select an exact face by Postscript name
            font_family postscript_name=FiraCode
            # Select an exact face by family with features and variable weight
            font_family family=SourceCodeVF variable_name=SourceCodeUpright features="+zero cv01=2" wght=380

The following are the known keys, any other keys are names of variable axes, that is, they are used to set the variable value for some font characteristic.

    family
        A font family name. A family typically has multiple actual font faces, such as bold and italic variants. One or more of the faces can even be variable, allowing fine tuning of font characteristics.

    style
        A style name to choose a particular font from a given family. Useful only with the family key, when no more precise methods for face selection are specified. Can also be used to specify a named variable style for variable fonts.

    postscript_name
        The actual postscript name for a font face. This allows selecting a particular variant within a font family. But note that postscript names are usually insufficient for selecting variable fonts.

    full_name
        This can be used to select a particular font face in a family. However, it is less precise than postscript_name and should not generally be used.

    variable_name
        Some families with variable fonts actually contain multiple font files. For example, a family could have variable weights with one font file containing upright variable weight faces and another containing italic variable weight faces. Well designed fonts use a variable name to distinguish between such files. Should be used in conjunction with family to select a particular variable font file.

    features
        A space separated list of OpenType font features to enable/disable or select a value of, for this font. Consult the documentation for the font family to see what features it supports and their effects. The exact syntax for specifying features is documented by HarfBuzz <https://harfbuzz.github.io/harfbuzz-hb-common.html#hb-feature-from-string>

    system
        This can be used to pass an arbitrary string, usually a family or full name to the OS font selection APIs. Should not be used in conjunction with any other keys. Is the same as specifying just the font name without any keys.

In addition to these keys, any four letter key is treated as the name of a variable characteristic of the font. Its value is used to set the value for the name.

Author

Kovid Goyal

Copyright

2025, Kovid Goyal