Installation

Currently, catnip only supports being installed from source. However, support for packaged distributions may be added in the future (contributions welcome!).

Dependencies

Catnip depends on the following packages to run:

• rsvg
• cairo
• pango
• luajit
• xkbcommon
• wlroots
• wayland

(Note that some of these packages may depend on one another so its not a "minimal" set of dependencies. This is simply the list of dependencies that catnip directly uses.)

It is recommended to install these using your system package manager. For example, on Arch you can use:

pacman -S librsvg cairo pango luajit libxkbcommon wlroots wayland

Building

After installing all the required dependencies, grab a copy of the source code from the GitHub repository. This can be done either via git clone or by downloading a tarball from the Releases page:

git clone https://github.com/bsuth/catnip.git

Once you have a copy of the source code, navigate to the catnip directory and run:

make

This should create a build/ directory that contains the executable itself (as well as some other build artifacts).

You can now either mv this executable wherever you like, or to a sane default using:

make install

By default, this will install the executable to /usr/local/bin/catnip.

NOTE: catnip adheres to the GNU convention for installation directories. This means that you may customize the installation directory used in make install via the prefix, exec_prefix, and bindir environment variables:

bindir="~/.local/bin" make install

Running

You can check whether the executable was installed properly by running:

catnip --help

Or, you can run the compositor via:

catnip

For a full list of CLI options, check out the CLI documentation.