Nowadays, I’m using kitty as my terminal emulator. It’s a pretty lightweight emulator, which utilizes the GPU for rendering.

Upon opening my first ssh session 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 like ctrl+a should be working as intended.