Kitty remote control and kitten wrapper

[doctorfree]

I've written a kitty remote control and kitten wrapper that enables quick and easy scripted control of some aspects of kitty.

See the kitty-control readme for an overview, installation instructions, examples, and usage. At first I just wanted an easy way to switch kitty configuration when I moved from a small screen (laptop) to a large screen (tv). To do this I wrote a kitten that loads a specified kitty configuration without needing to quit kitty and restart with another config.

Then things escalated quickly and I added several other quick and easy ways to manipulate kitty using both remote control commands and kittens. I keep adding more stuff. Most of what kitty-control does can be done with kitty directly if you know the right command. It acts mainly as a convenience but also adds some functionality. In addition to the kitty control features, kitty-control detects if either kitty or kitty-control have available updates and presents an option to perform the upgrade.

Included with the kitty-control installation are kitty-control itself, the read_config.py kitten, and a UNIX style man page.

Typical usage is from the command line but when invoked without arguments an interactive menu is presented. The main kitty-control interactive menu provides dynamically generated menu entries. For example, if either kitty or kitty-control have an
available upgrade then menu entries to upgrade will be added.

The kitty-control main menu:

Check it out and let me know what you think and how it could be improved.

[kovidgoyal]

You no longer need the kitten part with: 065b17d

[doctorfree]

@kovidgoyal That's great! Thanks.

I will replace my kitten with calls to load-config-file. In which version of kitty was this feature introduced?

[kovidgoyal]

It's in master

[doctorfree]

Ok, here is what I'm currently doing in kitty-control to check whether I can use the load-config-file Kitty command:

# Check for new load-config-file Kitty command
USE_LOAD_CONFIG=1
if [ "${KITTY_WINDOW_ID}" ]; then
  # Running in a Kitty window
  kitty @ ${SOCKET} load-config-file 2>/dev/null
  [ $? -eq 0 ] || USE_LOAD_CONFIG=
else
  # Not sure how to check without a Kitty window so use read_config.py
  USE_LOAD_CONFIG=
fi

Perhaps there is a simpler approach, this is the first pass.

Once load-config-file is integrated into a release I can check for the release and upgrade if necessary.

I see where there has been some discussion of how to detect if running in a Kitty window. I'll read up on that.

Anyway, this first pass at using load-config-file seems to be working. Thanks!

[doctorfree]

Never mind, I'm still working on this. I think it might be better to do the check and invocation in Python so I may rework this.

[doctorfree]

Version 1.0.9 of kitty-control now uses the load-config built-in kitten if it is available. In addition, several new features have been added including command line and menu support for opening kitty documentation in a browser window using the action kitten. Features now include:

• Easily switch a running kitty instance configuration without restart
• Set various kitty configuration options on the fly including font size, background, foreground, window size, and more
• Diff files or folders, selections are performed using the ranger file manager and fzf fuzzy finder
• Quickly and easily toggle fullscreen display of the kitty terminal window
• Set the kitty theme on the fly using the kitty themes kitten
• List colors, tabs, and windows
• Open an interactive menu system to easily browse kitty-control features and capabilities
• Display system and terminal information
• Set the level of opacity/transparency on the fly
• Input Unicode characters using the kitty Unicode input kitten
• Select and view an image using the kitty icat kitten
• Select and set a background image using ranger and fzf
• Set the kitty window layout using the kitty goto-layout kitten
• Browse the kitty documentation using the kitty action kitten