Kitty

Kitty is a command line interface for interacting with the Kattis platform for coding challenges. Kitty allows you to fetch problems and test and submit solutions straight from your terminal - and with more features to come!

Credit must be given where credit is due; this CLI has been inspired by the official submission script from Kattis and the Python Kat CLI from the guys over at Duckapple/Kat.

Demo

kitty.demo.480p.mp4

Usage

To get a list of all usable commands and their description, run

kitty --help

To get further information about subcommands, simply run

kitty <SUBCOMMAND> --help

Using -h instead of --help will give you a summary rather than the full help message.

Fetching

To fetch a problem, execute

kitty get <PROBLEM ID>

This will create a directory with the problem id as the name and a subdirectory called test, which will contain the official test cases given in the problem description.

You can find the problem id in the URL of the Kattis problem, an example being ferryloading in https://open.kattis.com/problems/ferryloading.

Testing

When you have written a solution, you can run it through the test cases with

kitty test [PATH TO PROBLEM]

This will (compile if required and) run your solution, piping the content of each test sample to stdin, showing the result afterwards.

The path argument must point to the same folder that was created using kitty get. Note that the default value of PATH TO PROBLEM is the current directory.

Submitting

When you're happy with your solution, you can attempt to submit it to Kattis. Like with the test command, call

kitty submit [PATH TO PROBLEM]

To upload your solution, Kitty needs access to your .kattisrc file. Run the command, and you will receive an error telling you what to do in order to set it up.

Templates

You can define your own custom templates for your preferred programming language. If you use kitty get, you can add an optional parameter --lang, specifying what template you want to use. For example, in your kitty config directory, you can create the file kitty/templates/template.java containing the following code:

import java.util.Scanner;

public class $FILENAME {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);

        sc.close();
    }
}

Then you can call

kitty get --lang java

which will create a file called <PROBLEM ID>.java that you can use.

Alternatively, you can set the default language for kitty to use so that you don't need to specify the language argument every time you fetch a problem. See the following configuration section for more.

Configuration

All configuration is stored in kitty's configuration folder. To find the location of kitty's configuration folder, run kitty config location.

If you want to use another location for the configuration folder, you can use the KATTIS_KITTY_CONFIG_DIR environment variable. This may be useful for those of you who use the kitty terminal. For example:

KATTIS_KITTY_CONFIG_DIR=~/dotfiles/my-kitty-cli-config-dir kitty config location

Naturally, you can add this environment variable to your shell of choice.

.kattisrc

Kattis provides you with a .kattisrc file, which contains:

• Authentication credentials, which kitty uses to submit on your behalf
• Information about the Kattis host, which you can use to control where kitty should fetch from and submit to. For example, you can change open.kattis.com to ncpc22.kattis.com.

You can download your personal .kattisrc at https://open.kattis.com/download/kattisrc.

kitty.yml

Kitty does not store information about programming languages (how to run or compile a program, file extensions, etc.) - instead it is you who must define which programming languages kitty can use. This also means you are completely free to specify compiler flags, add new languages and so forth.

The configuration is done via a YAML file called kitty.yml located in your kitty configuration folder. This repository contains an example configuration (with comments describing the different options): kitty.yml. Here you will find configurations for a fair amount of languages supported by Kattis. Feel free to simply download that file as it may fit your needs just fine.

To see which languages kitty has picked up on from your configuration file, run

$ kitty langs
Name       Extension
C          c
C#         cs
C++        cpp
Go         go
Haskell    hs
Java       java
Python 3   py
Rust       rs

Testing programmatically

There may be cases where you want to automatically generate test cases with a program. To do this, kitty has the debug input command that will feed whatever your input generator outputs into your solution program:

kitty debug input

The logical equivalence of this command is running run-solution < $(run-input-generator) n times or until a runtime error occurs.

See the help message for how to create the input generator and specify the number of iterations. By default, kitty uses the file at <solution folder>/debug/input.<extension>.

On top of this, you can use kitty to automatically check your solution's answer against another implementation. For instance, you may be able to implement a correct but slow solution. When developing the faster solution, you can use the slow solution to check that the new version outputs the correct answers across automatically generated inputs:

kitty debug answer

This is logically equivalent to kitty test but where the .in file is replaced with an input generator program and the .ans file is replaced with an answer validator program.

See the help message for more information. By default, kitty uses the file at <solution folder>/debug/answer.<extension>.

Installation

Installation script (Windows only)

You can use the following PowerShell command to install kitty. This will download the latest binary and a default config file.

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/avborup/kitty/master/scripts/install.ps1'))

Cargo

You can install Kitty using cargo.

cargo install --git https://github.com/avborup/kitty

Prebuilt binaries

You can find prebuilt binaries in the releases section for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Once the binary is downloaded, you should be ready to go. Remember to make sure that the binary is in your PATH.

As an example, to install kitty in /usr/local/bin on Ubuntu, you can run the following command:

(cd /usr/local/bin && curl -L https://github.com/avborup/kitty/releases/latest/download/kitty-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu > kitty && chmod +x kitty)

At this point, you should be able to freely run kitty anywhere on your system. If you get a permission denied error, maybe you need to give yourself access to the install folder via sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/bin.

Updating

To update kitty, you can run kitty update.

Feature requests

Feel free to create a new issue if you have any problems or have any feature requests. Pull requests are also welcome.