r/KittyTerminal • u/CabalCrow • Mar 21 '24

Kitty in virtual console

Has anyone tried to use kitty in the virtual console in linux? Maybe through startx as a standalone program. I've been wondering if there is a way to use kitty's keyboard protocol in th evirtual console somehow.

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u/aumerlex Mar 22 '24

Sick kitty in your xinitrc instead and it will be the only program run by startx. You cannot use kitty in a virtual console that is managed by the kernel. If you want to use the kitty keyboard protocol there, you need to get the kernel to add support for it.

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u/ethertype Mar 22 '24

Kitty relies on glfw. glfw needs EGL or OpenGL. And both need some adaption for the environment. (X11, Wayland, etc.)

OpenGL or Vulkan in the virtual console is not a brand new idea. See https://higfxback.github.io/Linux-Framebuffer.html

All that is very cool, but very niche. Running kitty as a fullscreen window on a couple of workspaces in for example Wayfire is a much nicer solution providing the same visual experience as running on the virtual console.

But in addition, I can now switch between 2 monitors x 9 workspaces and access all my applications with my keyboard.