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  to select alternate glyph shapes, and Variable fonts to control the weight or spacing of a font
       precisely. You can also select which font is used to render particular unicode  codepoints  and  you  can
       modify font metrics and even adjust the gamma curves 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 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

       system This can be used to pass an arbitrary string, usuall  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. It's value is used to set the value for the name.

Author

       Kovid Goyal

Copyright

       2025, Kovid Goyal

0.41.1                                            Jun 05, 2025                            kitten-choose-fonts(1)