A rough idea about custom kittens

[zzhaolei]

Currently, kittens like icat are written in Go, but as far as I know, users can’t write their own kittens in Go.

I’m wondering if it would be possible to expose some APIs so that users could implement custom kittens in Go (by compiling Go code into C-shared libraries).

The advantage would be that we could leverage Go’s type safety, autocompletion, and performance

[kovidgoyal]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2025 at 08:18:55PM -0700, zhaolei wrote: Currently, kittens like icat are written in Go, but as far as I know, users can’t write their own kittens in Go. I’m wondering if it would be possible to expose some APIs so that users could implement custom kittens in Go (by compiling Go code into C-shared libraries).

Native code kittens are not a path I want to go down, the drawbacks are rather severe, including the ability to crash kitty, the need to build the kitten for every platform kitty supports, and so on.

The advantage would be that we could leverage Go’s type safety, autocompletion, and performance

You can use mypy for type safety in python which gives you autocompletion as well. I dont see how performance would be a concern since kittens are meant for UI manipulation. Note that you can write the main() part of the kitten (the part that runs inside a terminal window) as a normal terminal program in any language you like. In your kitten's main() simply run your compiled program using os.exec() or subprocess.run()

[zzhaolei]

Note that you can write the main() part of the kitten (the part that runs inside a terminal window) as a normal terminal program in any language you like. In your kitten's main() simply run your compiled program using os.exec() or subprocess.run()

That’s also a good approach.

[kovidgoyal]

And, I should mention that you can leverage all the kitten infrastructure that kitty's go kittens themselves use by import github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty into your go kitten that you run in the main() function.