Building kitty from source¶
kitty is designed to run from source, for easy hack-ability. Make sure the following dependencies are installed first.
Note
If you are making small changes only to the python parts of kitty, there is no need to build kitty at all, instead, assuming you have installed the official kitty binaries, you can simply set the KITTY_DEVELOP_FROM enviroment variable to point to the directory into which you have checked out the kitty source code. kitty will then load its python code from there. You should use a version of the source that matches the binary version as closely as possible, since the two are tightly coupled.
Dependencies¶
Run-time dependencies:
python >= 3.6
harfbuzz >= 2.2.0
zlib
libpng
liblcms2
freetype (not needed on macOS)
fontconfig (not needed on macOS)
libcanberra (not needed on macOS)
ImageMagick (optional, needed to use the
kitty +kitten icat
tool to display images in the terminal)pygments (optional, need for syntax highlighting in
kitty +kitten diff
)
Build-time dependencies:
gcc or clang
pkg-config
For building on Linux in addition to the above dependencies you might also need to install the
-dev
packages for:libdbus-1-dev
,libxcursor-dev
,libxrandr-dev
,libxi-dev
,libxinerama-dev
,libgl1-mesa-dev
,libxkbcommon-x11-dev
,libfontconfig-dev
,libx11-xcb-dev
,liblcms2-dev
, andlibpython3-dev
, if they are not already installed by your distro.
Install and run from source¶
git clone https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty && cd kitty
Now build the native code parts of kitty with the following command:
make
You can run kitty, as:
./kitty/launcher/kitty
If that works, you can create a symlink to the launcher in ~/bin
or
some other directory on your PATH so that you can run kitty using
just kitty
.
Building kitty.app on macOS from source¶
Run:
make app
This kitty.app
unlike the released one does not include its own copy of
python and the other dependencies. So if you ever un-install/upgrade those dependencies
you might have to rebuild the app.
Note
The released kitty.dmg
includes all dependencies, unlike the
kitty.app
built above and is built automatically by using the
<https://github.com/kovidgoyal/bypy>`_ however, that is designed to
run on Linux and is not for the faint of heart.
Note
Apple disallows certain functionality, such as notifications for unsigned applications. If you need this functionality, you can try signing the built kitty.app with a self signed certificate, see for example, here.
Build and run from source with Nix¶
On NixOS or any other Linux or macOS system with the Nix package manager
installed, execute nix-shell to create
the correct environment to build kitty or use nix-shell --pure
instead to
eliminate most of the influence of the outside system, e.g. globally installed
packages. nix-shell
will automatically fetch all required dependencies and
make them available in the newly spawned shell.
Then proceed with make
or make app
according to the platform specific instructions above.
Note for Linux/macOS packagers¶
The released kitty source code is available as a tarball from the GitHub releases page.
While kitty does use python, it is not a traditional python package, so please do not install it in site-packages. Instead run:
python3 setup.py linux-package
This will install kitty into the directory linux-package
. You can run kitty
with linux-package/bin/kitty
. All the files needed to run kitty will be in
linux-package/lib/kitty
. The terminfo file will be installed into
linux-package/share/terminfo
. Simply copy these files into /usr
to install
kitty. In other words, linux-package
is the staging area into which kitty is
installed. You can choose a different staging area, by passing the --prefix
argument to setup.py
.
You should probably split kitty into two packages, kitty-terminfo
that
installs the terminfo file and kitty
that installs the main program.
This allows users to install the terminfo file on servers into which they ssh,
without needing to install all of kitty.
Note
You need a couple of extra dependencies to build linux-package.
tic
to compile terminfo files, usually found in the
development package of ncurses
. Also, if you are building from
a git checkout instead of the released source code tarball, you will
need sphinx-build
from the Sphinx documentation generator.
This applies to creating packages for kitty for macOS package managers such as brew or MacPorts as well.
Note
kitty has its own update check mechanism, if you would like to turn
it off for your package, use
python3 setup.py linux-package --update-check-interval=0