Trouble remote controlling kitty from nvim

[samEngineering]

After reading the docs about allow_remote_control and listen_on, and reading this discussion, I am still a little short on understanding.
My goal is to run kitty @ set-spacing padding=0 from within nvim so that the margins look nice for the tabline while running nvim (and then reverting after nvim is closed. In my kitty config, I have allow_remote_control yes.

on the nvim side, I have
os.execute("kitty @ set-spacing padding=0")
in my init.lua but no result.

I also tried
os.execute("kitty @ set-spacing padding=0 && kill -s SIGUSR1 <pid>"),
where <pid> is the pid of the current kitty instance. No dice there either. I tried each of the above commands with kitten in place of kitty as well. Executing the command kitty @ set-spacing padding=0 on the command line in the terminal (outside of nvim) works as expected.

I have verified that the os.execute call is working by putting
os.execute("echo 'hello, world!' > file.txt"),
in the init.lua and verifying the existence and contents of file.txt. I am hoping someone with more knowledge of remote control can lend some tips ^_^

[kovidgoyal]

neovim does not connect processes launched by os.execute() to the tty device. So either setup a socket for remote control, or use vim rather than neovim or run kitty from master and use a watcher witch listens for the setting of user variables and configure neovim to set a user variable of startup and delete it on shutdown.

[samEngineering]

So helpful, thank you!
I'll read up on sockets and work on these suggestions.