How to get kitty tab title using kitty @ ls | jq

[salmankhilji]

The issue with the following jq query is that it needs the tab to be focused when it is called. I have a bash script running in a non-focused (i.e., background) tab that needs to get the title of the kitty tab its running in.

kitty @ ls | jq '.[0].tabs | .[] | select(.is_focused == true) | .title'

Writing a jq query that gets the tab title from within a background tab seems to be significantly harder. Does kitty provider an easier way?

[kovidgoyal]

I dont use jq so I can help with that. If I were you I'd simply write a script in a proper programming language, which makes it trivial. Indeed just use python and you can run it with kitty itself, like this

kitty +launch myscript.py

[resolritter]

not sure if I understand the problem, but why don't you save the tab id in a variable when the tab is created? then you can use it in your jq script later

[salmankhilji]

not sure if I understand the problem, but why don't you save the tab id in a variable when the tab is created? then you can use it in your jq script later

Indeed this is what I did to solve this problem. I saved the tab title into an environment variable that I could later access from within my script. My initial idea to read it from kitty @ ls output would not have worked. That is because even if a tab was created without the --tab-title option, the kitty @ ls output contained a fallback title, so the script did not know which title the user had specified.

Anyway, I refactored my scripts further to not even need this anymore.