Name

       kitten-panel - Use a command line program to draw a GPU accelerated panel on your X11 desktop

Overview

       You  can  use  this  kitten  to draw a GPU accelerated panel on the edge of your screen or as the desktop
       wallpaper, that shows the output from an arbitrary terminal program.

       It is useful for showing status information or notifications on  your  desktop  using  terminal  programs
       instead of GUI toolkits.
         Screenshot, showing a sample panel (images not supported)

       The  screenshot  above shows a sample panel that displays the current desktop and window title as well as
       miscellaneous system information such as network activity, CPU load, date/time, etc.

       New in version 0.34.0: Support for Wayland

       NOTE:
          This kitten currently only works on X11 desktops and Wayland compositors that support  the  wlr  layer
          shell protocol (which is almost all of them except the, as usual, crippled GNOME).

       Using this kitten is simple, for example:

          kitty +kitten panel sh -c 'printf "\n\n\nHello, world."; sleep 5s'

       This  will show Hello, world. at the top edge of your screen for five seconds. Here, the terminal program
       we are running is sh with a script to print out Hello, world!. You  can  make  the  terminal  program  as
       complex as you like, as demonstrated in the screenshot above.

       If you are on Wayland, you can, for instance run:

          kitty +kitten panel --edge=background htop

       to  display  htop  as  your  desktop background. Remember this works in everything but GNOME and also, in
       sway, you have to disable the background wallpaper as sway renders that over the panel kitten surface.

Source code for panel

       The source code for this kitten is available on GitHub.

Command line interface

          kitty +kitten panel [options] program-to-run

       Use a command line program to draw a GPU accelerated panel on your X11 desktop

   Options
       --columns <LINES>, --lines <LINES>
              The number of lines shown in the panel if horizontal otherwise the number of columns shown in  the
              panel. Ignored for background panels.  Default: 1

       --edge <EDGE>
              Which edge of the screen to place the panel on. Note that some window managers (such as i3) do not
              support placing docked windows on the left and right edges. The value background  means  make  the
              panel the "desktop wallpaper". This is only supported on Wayland, not X11 and note that when using
              sway if you set a background in your sway config it will cover the  background  drawn  using  this
              kitten.  Default: top Choices: background, bottom, left, right, top

       --config <CONFIG>, -c <CONFIG>
              Path to config file to use for kitty when drawing the panel.

       --override <OVERRIDE>, -o <OVERRIDE>
              Override  individual  kitty  configuration  options,  can  be  specified  multiple  times. Syntax:
              name=value. For example: kitty +kitten panel -o font_size=20

       --output-name <OUTPUT_NAME>
              On Wayland, the panel can only be displayed on a single monitor (output) at a  time.  This  allows
              you  to  specify  which  output  is  used, by name. If not specified the compositor will choose an
              output automatically, typically the last output the user interacted with or the primary monitor.

       --class <CLS>
              Set the class part of the WM_CLASS window property. On Wayland, it  sets  the  app  id.   Default:
              kitty-panel

       --name <NAME>
              Set the name part of the WM_CLASS property (defaults to using the value from kitty --class)

       --debug-rendering
              For internal debugging use.

Author

       Kovid Goyal

Copyright

       2024, Kovid Goyal