[macOS] keep application running if all windows are closed

[aequitas]

Currently if all windows are closed, kitty application will quit. Normal behaviour for macOS applications is to keep running until explicitly told to quit. This allows to have the application in the [cmd]-[tab] menu to switch to and create new windows. It would be nice for kitty to adopt this behaviour as well.

[kovidgoyal]

Not worth the effort for me, but patches are welcome. Why would you use cmd-tab to create a new window instead of spotlight or a global hotkey to create new windows?

[aequitas]

Thanks for the quick response. I understand you don't deem this worth the effort on your part. I'd be glad to contribute the patch for this.

To recap: on macOS applications and apps are 2 separate entities, so to say. You run an application which in turn contains the apps. Compared to windows/linux where every window is its own application. So on macOS you switch to an application using cmd-tab, so you can act within that application context (interact with it, switch windows, create windows, etc).

I already use spotlight to initially start kitty, but I like it to behave like all other mac apps I use frequently in that I can access it from the tab menu regardless of the amount of windows it has. Creating a hotkey is a good suggestion but it's not a fit for me.

After some initial investigation yesterday I think the part where the change should be made is in this main_loop https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/master/kitty/child-monitor.c#L767 to keep it running after the last window has been closed. However I think the handling of input events requires an active window/child as I have not yet been able to make it work. Maybe you can shed a light on this?

[kovidgoyal]

You basically need to change main_loop() to not quit when no windows are present. And then you need to change GLFW, the toolkit kitty uses (see the glfw directory) to process key events with no active window. Then you need to change kitty, to make use of the changes in glfw to process key events with no active window. This is a fairly big job.

[kovidgoyal]

Thanks to the fix for #524 this became simple to implement.

[spartan-tainguyen]

For some people, the default Mac's behavior is annoying. So would we create a kitty config option to opt-out this behavior?

[kovidgoyal]

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.macos_quit_when_last_window_closed