Kitten Popup Renderer

A not so elegant, but somewhat aesthetical solution to the problem

The Problem

Linux desktop environments mostly provide complete experience, except those that don't. One of the common lacking pieces are the popups when changing brightness and audio volume.

The Solution

Since I am dumb and don't know how to render popups, I decided to use kitty's kitten panel feature to render a terminal window like a status bar. Which is stupid, but rather in a funny way, so probably usable.

Installation

Like any other Rust project, Installation is pretty simple:

cargo install --git https://github.com/rdsq/kitty-popup-renderer

Dependencies

In order to work in runtime, it needs:

• kitty for the kitten panel command
• brightnessctl for getting current brightness level
• ALSA for getting current audio volume

Usage

Call kitten-popup-renderer brightness to display the brightness popup, and kitten-popup-renderer volume to display the volume popup. You probably want to put those after your brightness/volume changing bindings in your config

Hyprland example:

bindel = ,XF86AudioRaiseVolume, exec, wpctl set-volume -l 1 @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SINK@ 5%+ && ~/.cargo/bin/kitten-popup-renderer volume
bindel = ,XF86AudioLowerVolume, exec, wpctl set-volume @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SINK@ 5%- && ~/.cargo/bin/kitten-popup-renderer volume
bindel = ,XF86AudioMute, exec, wpctl set-mute @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SINK@ toggle && ~/.cargo/bin/kitten-popup-renderer volume
bindel = ,XF86MonBrightnessUp, exec, brightnessctl -e4 -n2 set 5%+ && ~/.cargo/bin/kitten-popup-renderer brightness
bindel = ,XF86MonBrightnessDown, exec, brightnessctl -e4 -n2 set 5%- && ~/.cargo/bin/kitten-popup-renderer brightness