kitDOOM

Play Doom, with real graphics and sound, directly inside your terminal.

(Part of kit* series of graphic terminal apps: kitim kitmd kitpdf kitdraw kitDOOM)

kitDOOM runs on terminals that supports the Kitty graphics protocol: Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, cmux

Note: Only "Knee Deep in the Dead" WAD is included in the binary. You can provide your own WAD the -iwad flag (see Notes below).

Install

cargo install kitdoom

Then just kitdoom to play.

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Why

• Stop leaving the terminal just to scratch the "one quick level" itch.
• Skip emulator windows, launcher setup, and graphics backends you do not need.
• Keep Doom playable over a terminal workflow with the original framebuffer streamed as Kitty graphics.

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Key Capabilities

• Instant terminal carnage: launch Doom from termimal and just start playing.
• Original pixels, modern pipe: stream Doom's 640x400 framebuffer through compressed Kitty graphics chunks.
• Sound included: bundled effects and music play through the miniaudio bridge with no SDL setup.

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Usage

kitdoom
kitdoom -nosound
kitdoom -iwad /path/to/doom.wad

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How It Works

doomgeneric C engine -> Rust FFI callbacks -> RGB framebuffer
        -> zlib + base64 Kitty chunks -> terminal
        -> crossterm input + miniaudio sound -> Doom loop

kitdoom keeps the engine proven and the terminal layer sharp: Rust owns the terminal lifecycle, input, scaling, timing, and Kitty rendering, while the vendored Doom core does what it already does best.

Notes

This version comes with Doom shareware WAD (doom1.wad), it only has first episode: "Knee-Deep in the Dead". You can find WAD online, for example: archive.org, Ultimate Doom, The.zip has full game (4 episodes). To use your own WAD, you can run kitdoom -iwad /path/to/doom.wad.