kitten-query-terminal(1)

📦
version 0.49.2 · 12 versions
, in arch rolling, nixpkgs unstable

💖 Name 💖

okay bestie, this is kitten-query-terminal(1) from the kitten Manual — the little kitten that asks your terminal what it can do and then spills the tea about its supported capabilities ✨. It’s literally “Query the terminal for various capabilities.”

🌸 Usage 🌸

kitten query-terminal [options] [query1 query2 ...]

🦋 Description 🦋

so here’s the vibe: this kitten queries the terminal it’s running inside for a whole bunch of capabilities. It sends escape codes to the terminal, waits for the response, and prints data about the supported capabilities based on what came back. big main character energy 💅

heads up though: this is a blocking operation, because it has to wait for the terminal to respond 😭. You can control the maximum wait time with the --wait-for option.

The output is lines shaped like this:

query: data

If some query isn’t supported by the running kitty version, the data comes out blank — no cap, just empty bestie 🫶.

And when you call this from another program, be very careful not to do any I/O on the terminal device until this kitten exits. Like, fr fr, don’t touch it until it’s done.

Available queries are:

  • name — the terminal name, e.g. xterm-kitty 🏷️
  • version — the terminal version, e.g. 0.49.2 ⭐
  • allow_hyperlinks — the allow_hyperlinks config option in kitty.conf for allowing hyperlinks; it can be yes, no, or ask 🔗
  • font_family — the current font’s PostScript name 🎀
  • bold_font — the current bold font’s PostScript name 💪
  • italic_font — the current italic font’s PostScript name ✨
  • bold_italic_font — the current bold-italic font’s PostScript name 🔥
  • font_size — the current font size in pts 📏
  • dpi_x — the current DPI on the x-axis 🧭
  • dpi_y — the current DPI on the y-axis 🗺️
  • foreground — the current foreground color as a 24-bit # color code 🎨
  • background — the current background color as a 24-bit # color code 🖌️
  • background_opacity — the current background opacity as a number between 0 and 1 🫥
  • clipboard_control — the clipboard_control config option in kitty.conf for allowing reads/writes to/from the clipboard 📋
  • os_name — the name of the OS the terminal is running on. kitty returns these values: bsd, linux, macos, unknown 💻

👑 Options 👑

  • --wait-for [=10] — the amount of time (in seconds) to wait for a response from the terminal, after querying it ⏳
  • --help, -h [=no] — show help for this command 🙋‍♀️

okay that’s the whole page bestie 🫶💖 — this was kitten-query-terminal(1) from the kitten Manual, version 0.49.2, dated Oct 01, 2026. mwah 💋

📦 where this page comes from