> Kitty should just identify as xterm like every other terminal written in the last 20 years.
You can do that by adding "term xterm-256color" to kitty.conf. The manual page warns against this but it seems to be mostly compatible. Kitty-specific extensions probably won't function remotely but it still serves as a nice portable terminal which can be configured with dotfiles.
The fact that the terminal is identified based on a TERM environment variable made sense if you want to support many hardware terminals which can't otherwise identify themselves and predate terminfo.
Maybe in the modern world applications could use an escape sequence to check for extensions on top of standard xterm?
You can do that by adding "term xterm-256color" to kitty.conf. The manual page warns against this but it seems to be mostly compatible. Kitty-specific extensions probably won't function remotely but it still serves as a nice portable terminal which can be configured with dotfiles.
The fact that the terminal is identified based on a TERM environment variable made sense if you want to support many hardware terminals which can't otherwise identify themselves and predate terminfo.
Maybe in the modern world applications could use an escape sequence to check for extensions on top of standard xterm?