Is there a configuration option to set LC_CTYPE?

[anttikissa]

First of all, I'm on macOS 11.1 and kitty version 0.19.3.

I just changed to kitty and noticed that when running kitty from the system launcher (as opposed from another terminal, where LC_CTYPE is already set in environment), LC_CTYPE is not set to UTF-8, and this caused some things to break. In particular, vim thinks that my .vimrc is encoded in latin1 (which it isn't), leading to errors.

I can work around this by setting LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 in .zshrc, but that only works for my shell - for instance when using the Preferences menu option to edit kitty config file, I get the same .vimrc error (I took me a while to realize that this happens because encoding issues):

I looked into how other terminals set LC_CTYPE, and found settings for it in Terminal.app and iTerm2:

Terminal has Profiles -> Advanced -> Set locale environment variables on startup:

iTerm2 has Profiles -> Terminal -> Set locale variables automatically

Unchecking these options unsets LC_CTYPE, and running locale shows LC_CTYPE="C". And I get the same vim error.

As far as I can remember, I have never touched these options, so I assume UTF-8 is the default nowadays. My memory could fail me though.

Is there a configuration option to set LC_CTYPE to a given value? It might even make sense to default this to UTF-8, if the system doesn't provide a default value for this. (Not sure about different systems and languages, but as an European Mac user that would seem like a reasonable default.)

[kovidgoyal]

Use the env directive in kitty.conf to set any env var you like.

[anttikissa]

Ah, that did it - I had somehow overlooked the env directive. Thank you!

I got so far as to install a plist file according to this StackOverflow answer but this is a much simpler way.