kovidgoyal/kitty · warning · SystemExit

Should be run as kitten hints

Error message

Should be run as kitten hints

What it means

Writing the single wakeup byte 'w' to the canberra notification-sound pipe failed (non-EINTR error). The sound event stays queued until the canberra thread next wakes, so the expected sound may be delayed or missed. Purely an audio-notification plumbing failure.

Source

Thrown at kittens/query_terminal/main.py:297

    query: data

If a particular :italic:`query` is unsupported by the running kitty version, the
:italic:`data` will be blank.

Note that when calling this from another program, be very careful not to perform
any I/O on the terminal device until this kitten exits.

Available queries are:

{}

""".format('\n'.join(f':code:`{name}`:\n  {c.help_text}\n' for name, c in all_queries.items()))
usage = '[query1 query2 ...]'


if __name__ == '__main__':
    raise SystemExit('Should be run as kitten hints')
elif __name__ == '__doc__':
    cd = sys.cli_docs  # type: ignore
    cd['usage'] = usage
    cd['options'] = options_spec
    cd['help_text'] = help_text
    cd['short_desc'] = 'Query the terminal for various capabilities'

View on GitHub (pinned to 6d5d0c4406)

Solutions

1. If sounds otherwise work, treat a one-off occurrence during shutdown as harmless
2. If sounds never play, check audio setup (libcanberra, PipeWire/PulseAudio) and kitty's audio support on your platform
3. Update kitty — sound-thread lifecycle bugs get fixed over versions

When it happens

Trigger: Triggering a bell/system sound (queue_canberra_sound, e.g. on window bell) when the canberra pipe write end is closed or the pipe is full/broken — typically during shutdown or if the sound thread died.

Common situations: Kitty shutting down while a bell fires; libcanberra unavailable or the audio thread crashed earlier; descriptor exhaustion making the write fail.

Related errors

• This must be run as kitten ask
• This should be run as kitten broadcast
• This must be run as kitten choose-files
• Pipe to kitten was broken while sending data to it
• Unknown action: {action}

AI-assisted analysis of kovidgoyal/kitty@6d5d0c4406 (2026-08-27). Data as JSON: /api/errors/58613bfb1fe4f2da. Report an issue: GitHub.