rc_protocol.rst

Documentation for the kitty remote control protocol

The kitty remote control protocol is a simple protocol that involves sending data to kitty in the form of JSON. Any individual command of kitty has the form:

<ESC>P@kitty-cmd<JSON object><ESC>\

Where <ESC> is the byte 0x1b. The JSON object has the form:

{
    "cmd": "command name",
    "version": <kitty version>,
    "no_response": <Optional Boolean>,
    "payload": <Optional JSON object>,
}

The version above is an array of the form [0, 14, 2]. If you are developing a standalone client, use the kitty version that you are developing against. Using a version greater than the version of the kitty instance you are talking to, will cause a failure.

Set no_response to true if you don't want a response from kitty.

The optional payload is a JSON object that is specific to the actual command being sent. The fields in the object for every command are documented below.

As a quick example showing how easy to use this protocol is, we will implement the @ ls command from the shell using only shell tools. First, run kitty as:

kitty -o allow_remote_control=socket-only --listen-on unix:/tmp/test

Now, in a different terminal, you can get the pretty printed @ ls output with the following command line:

echo -en '\eP@kitty-cmd{"cmd":"ls","version":[0,14,2]}\e\' | socat - unix:/tmp/test | awk '{ print substr($0, 13, length($0) - 14) }' | jq -c '.data | fromjson' | jq .