kanshi(1)

📦
version 1.9.0 · 14 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 kanshi(1) — the General Commands Manual glow-up 💖

okay bestie, sit down, we're talking about kanshi, and she is that girl. this is section 1 of the general commands manual, so she's a whole command, not a config file. iykyk. 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

kanshi — dynamic output configuration. that's it, that's the whole vibe. she configures your outputs. dynamically. 💅

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

kanshi [options...]

literally just run her, optionally with some flags. simple as. ⭐

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

  • -h, --help — pops up the help message and dips. the "wait what does this do" button. 🫶
  • -c, --config <config> — tells her exactly which config file to use, instead of letting her go find her own. picky queen behavior, we respect it. 💜
  • -l, --listen-fd <fd> — listen on the file descriptor you hand her, for IPC. she's on speaking terms with other processes, no cap. 🔥

👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

so here's the tea: kanshi is a Wayland daemon that automatically configures outputs. she just... does it. while you're living your life. main character energy, honestly. ✨

she's configured with a list of output profiles. each profile contains a set of outputs. a profile will be automatically activated if all the specified outputs are currently connected. and a profile contains configuration for each output. so it's like: profiles ➡️ sets of outputs ➡️ per-output config. nesting, but make it fashion. 🎀

and here's the part where she's lowkey reactive in the best way: if kanshi receives a SIGHUP signal, she will reread her config file. like, she just refreshes herself. iconic. 🌈

🧚 CONFIGURATION 🧚

kanshi reads her configuration from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kanshi/config. if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is unset, it defaults to ~/.config. so like, your home directory is doing the heavy lifting. 💖

an error is raised if no configuration file is found. she's not gonna guess, bestie. no config, no service. 😭

for the info on what actually goes inside the configuration file format, go read kanshi(5). sibling lore. 💜

💜 AUTHORS 💜

maintained by Simon Ser <contact@emersion.fr>, who is assisted by other open-source contributors — a whole squad, fr fr. for more information about kanshi development, see <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/kanshi>. 🫶

🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

and that's the page, babes. this one's dated 2026-01-24 and belongs to the kanshi(1) era of the general commands manual. go configure something cute. periodt. 💅✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from