From d89fd6653cd902701cd23f7935fbc938c70905c5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Julian Prein <julian@druck.dev>
Date: Thu, 22 May 2025 15:04:36 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] kitty: Make kitty startup fast

Starting a new kitty process is quite slow. With --single-instance "new
invocations will instead create a new top-level window in the existing
kitty instance"[^1] to allow "kitty to share a single sprite cache on
the GPU"[^1], so that startup is almost instant.

For this to work best, launch one hidden "daemon" instance at startup so
that the kitty process is always running, even when no OS windows
exists.

[^1]: kitty(1)

Link: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/330
---
 .config/i3/config | 14 +++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/.config/i3/config b/.config/i3/config
index 1153a6c..0fca47c 100644
--- a/.config/i3/config
+++ b/.config/i3/config
@@ -11,7 +11,8 @@ floating_modifier $mod
 default_border pixel 1
 hide_edge_borders smart
 
-set $TERMINAL kitty
+# Use --single-instance for faster startup. See the "daemon" exec below
+set $TERMINAL kitty --single-instance
 set $TERM_CLASS kitty
 set $TERM_DIR_FLAG -d
 set $TERM_TITLE_FLAG -T
@@ -29,6 +30,17 @@ set $TERM_CMD_FLAG
 
 # Execs ########################################################################
 
+# Starting a new kitty process is quite slow. With --single-instance (see
+# $TERMINAL definition above) "new invocations will instead create a new
+# top-level window in the existing kitty instance"[^1] to allow "kitty to share
+# a single sprite cache on the GPU"[^1], so that startup is almost instant.
+#
+# For this to work best, launch one hidden "daemon" instance at startup so that
+# the kitty process is always running, even when no OS windows exists.
+#
+# [^1]: kitty(1)
+exec --no-startup-id $TERMINAL --start-as hidden --detach
+
 # Multi monitor support
 exec_always --no-startup-id ~/.config/i3/monitor-setup.sh &