Use kitty for dmenu replacement.

[niksingh710]

I am trying to use kitty terminal as dmenu replacement.

kitten quick-access-terminal -c ./kitten.conf ./test.sh

^ works just the terminal does not exit after the completion of the script.
How can I achieve this behavior? or are there any other better ways of doing this?

[niksingh710]

kitten quick-access-terminal -c ./kitten.conf sh -c ./test.sh

^ This works fine.

[niksingh710]

This works, but not instant.

[kovidgoyal]

You dont want the terminal to close. Otherwise re-opening it wont be instant. Instead in your script needs to stay runing in the terminal and toggle its visibility using --toggle-visibility. Use the panel kitten not the quick-access-terminal for more control.

You can run

kitten panel --single-instance --instance-group dmenu --start-as-hidden --edge=center(or whatever) myscript.sh

Now in your window manager bind a key to run

kitten panel --single-instance --instance-group dmenu --toggle-visibility

this will cause the terminal to appear instantly. Every time you press the key.

In your script after you get the name of the program to run hide the terminal using the same command and then run the program.

[niksingh710]

This works perfectly as I wanted.
Just one question — is there any way I can send a SIGNAL or command to the instance?
Currently, I’m using a loop to keep the script alive, but if a new window is spawned or an existing one is closed, the script does not update that in the fzf list.

[kovidgoyal]

Generally speaking you can listen for focus in events which are sent as escape codes in your script. Or if that's too complicated when you are showing the window use a script that also sends a signal to all child processes of the kitty window, which you can get using tools such as ps or friends. In the script first send the signal then show the window using --toggle-visibility

[kovidgoyal]

Oh and just for completeness, you can actually get the same performance running your script in a new OS window each time. The outline of how to do that is

kitten panel --single-instance --instance-name dmenu --start-as-hidden cat

now when you want to show your menu:

kitten panel --single-instance --instance-name dmenu --start-as-hidden sh your-script.sh

this will give you almost the same performance but is much simpler architecture overall.

[niksingh710]

This is so simple and versatile, I can now use kitty for almost every stuff 😆

[niksingh710]

📌 For anyone reading this in the future:

You can run the following to start a hidden Kitty panel instance named dmenu:

kitten panel --single-instance --instance-group dmenu \
  --start-as-hidden --lines=0 --columns=0 cat

Tip: Adding the --detach flag will send this hidden panel to the background.

---

Now, you can quickly launch any script inside the dmenu-named kitten panel instance. For example:

kitten panel --single-instance --instance-group dmenu \
  --start-as-hidden --layer=top --edge=bottom \
  -o cursor_trail=0 -o background_opacity=0.4 \
  --focus-policy=exclusive --lines=20 \
  <yourScript or fzf wrapper>