Building kitty from source — kitty 0.12.3 documentation

# Building kitty from source

kitty is designed to run from source, for easy hackability. Make sure the following dependencies are installed first.

## Dependencies

Run-time dependencies:

> - python >= 3.5
> - harfbuzz >= 1.5.0
> - zlib
> - libpng
> - freetype (not needed on macOS)
> - fontconfig (not needed on macOS)
> - ImageMagick (optional, needed to use the `kitty 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` and `libxkbcommon-x11-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:

    python3 .

If that works, you can create a script to launch kitty:

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    import runpy
    runpy.run_path('/path/to/kitty/dir', run_name='__main__')

And place it in `~/bin` or `/usr/bin` so that you can run kitty using just `kitty`.

## Building kitty.app on macOS from source

Install imagemagick, optipng and librsvg using brew or similar (needed for the logo generation step). And 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 that the released `kitty.dmg` includes all dependencies, unlike the `kitty.app` built above and is built automatically by using the `kitty` branch of build-calibre however, that is designed to run on Linux and is not for the faint of heart.

## 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.