[CREDIT: This is mostly a re-post from an article of Lars O. Overskeid to keep the information handy]

Like in the original post, I’m also using kitty as my terminal emulator. There are some really cool features in this terminal emulator.

However, using ssh to connect to a remote host, I find that some keys (backspace), and keyboard shortcuts are not working, and I get the following error from my remote debian host:

'xterm-kitty': unknown terminal type.

This is because my remote host does not know how to handle kitty by default. Luckily, there’s a way to communicate what capabilities your terminal emulator have, using terminfo.

In order to copy over a terminfo file to your remote host’s ~/.terminfo folder, run the following:

kitty +kitten ssh your.remote.server

This will open a new session, and you should now have a file called ~/.terminfo/x/xterm-kitty, which will be loaded on every session from kitty in the future. Also, all normal keyboard shortcuts are working as intended.

ALERT: as noted in this issue on kitty’s github issue tracker, make sure to close all tmux session and open a new one after the copy of terminfo files.