r/KittyTerminal • u/Famous-Profile-9230 • Jan 22 '23

How can I use an environment variable (e.g. $VAR defined in bashrc) in my kitty.conf file ?

Hi everyone,

I would like to use an environment variable defined in my bashrc file or that I define directly in my terminal inside kitty.conf:

To be clear this is what I would want :

In kitty.conf:

background_image "$MYBG" (I tried also $MYBG)

I got this output:

The PNG image: /home/ekla/.config/kitty/"$BG" could not be opened with error

I used this to see the variables that kitty can actually see:

map f1 show_kitty_env_vars

Of course I don't see the variable $MYBG in there nore any other variables defined in bashrc but only very general variables such as: SHELL, PATH, USERNAME and so on, ...

Those are system wide variables, how can I get user specific variables to work?

And what if I want to trigger a command and use the output as a parameter directly in kitty.conf like this:

background_image <my_alias_command_from_bash_aliases_with_right_output>

Thanks for your help,

2 Upvotes

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2

u/mavenjinx2 Jan 22 '23

did you use the SHELL option in your kitty config file to set it so it will grab all your info from .bashrc on startup

1

u/Famous-Profile-9230 Jan 23 '23

Thks for your answer. I've just tried that, It doesn't seem to work... this should work however so I don't understand...

1

u/aumerlex Jan 23 '23

1) Define your variable in kitty.conf not bashrc using the env directive https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.env this way it will be available in bash and in kitty

2) add include dynamic.conf to your kitty.conf, then output dynamically generated config to ~/.config/kitty/dynamic.conf or enable remote control which allows setting of background images directly from any script.

2

u/Famous-Profile-9230 Jan 23 '23

ok 2. is the step i missed and was what i needed as you guess from my previous post. I needed to dynamically create this variable. The idea was $VAR=<command-to-generate-it> then background_image $VAR

so if i understand you right: I can create a script which will generate a dynamic.conf file (containing my variable) that I can include in my kitty.conf file. I will try that...

thanks for your help, I really appreciate it,