klipper-tui

A terminal UI for Klipper 3D printers. It does most of what you would open Mainsail or Fluidd for — watch temperatures, run a print, jog the toolhead, send gcode, look at the bed mesh, check the webcam — without leaving the terminal.

It talks to Moonraker, the API server that already runs alongside Klipper on your printer's host (usually a Raspberry Pi). Moonraker is what Mainsail and Fluidd talk to as well, so if either of those works in your browser, this will work too. Nothing is installed on the printer itself; this is a client you run on your own machine.

What you need

• A printer running Klipper with Moonraker, reachable over the network.
• Its address — the same host you type into your browser for Mainsail, e.g. mainsailos.local or 192.168.1.50.
• Python 3.10 or newer on the machine you run this from.

Install

pipx install klipper-tui

Or from a checkout:

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e .

Run

.venv/bin/klipper-tui mainsailos.local
# or
KLIPPER_HOST=mainsailos.local .venv/bin/klipper-tui

Use -p/--port if Moonraker is not on 7125.

Tabs

Ctrl+E sends an emergency stop. t cycles themes. q quits.

Themes

Ships with ominous (default, dark with burgundy), mainsail, and forge, plus a selection of Textual's built-ins. Choose one on the Settings tab, pass --theme, press t to cycle, or use the command palette (ctrl+p). The choice is saved.

Colours come from theme tokens rather than literals, so panels, charts, and the 3D view all follow the active theme.

Writing your own

Themes live in klipper_tui/theming.py. A theme is a Textual Theme plus a variables dict carrying the colours specific to this app. Copy an existing one and change the values:

MIDNIGHT = Theme(
    name="midnight",
    dark=True,
    background="#080b12",   # furthest back: the screen
    surface="#111722",      # panel cards sit on this
    panel="#1a2130",        # button faces, borders derive from it
    primary="#2f5d8a",      # filled buttons, progress bars
    secondary="#24455f",
    accent="#4d8fc4",       # panel titles, active tab, focused input
    foreground="#d3dae6",   # body text
    success="#4a7c59",      # homed axes, "at temperature"
    warning="#c08238",      # unhomed, cold nozzle, paused
    error="#cf3b3b",        # errors, e-stop, disconnected
    variables={
        "hot": "#e0754f",       # extruder trace on the graph
        "hot-dim": "#6b3020",   # its target line
        "bed": "#6f9bd1",       # bed trace
        "bed-dim": "#2f4a6b",   # its target line
        "vol-frame": "#4d8fc4", # build volume wireframe
        "vol-floor": "#4a5468", # bed plane and grid
        "vol-head": "#e8c25a",  # toolhead marker
        "vol-drop": "#cf6b5a",  # drop line and floor crosshair
    },
)

Then add it to the registry near the bottom of the file:

CUSTOM = {t.name: t for t in (OMINOUS, MAINSAIL, FORGE, MIDNIGHT)}

That is all — it appears on the Settings tab, in --theme, and in the t cycle. To make it the default, set DEFAULT_THEME = "midnight".

Notes

The eight variables entries are required. A theme missing them will fail to render the graph or the 3D view, which is why built-in Textual themes get them backfilled from NEUTRAL_DOMAIN when they are registered.

Textual derives a large set of tokens from the ones above — $panel-lighten-2 for borders, $text-muted for labels, $surface-darken-1 for the chart background, and so on — so the eleven colours here style the whole app.

Pick background, surface, and panel as three steps of the same hue rather than pure greys; the separation between them is what makes panels read as cards. accent should be legible against surface, since panel titles use it.

Two colours deliberately do not come from the theme. The bed mesh heightmap uses a fixed blue→green→red gradient, because it encodes measured values and needs to stay comparable between themes. The console resolves colours to concrete hex at write time, because RichLog renders Rich markup and cannot read $token styles.

Time remaining

The ETA prefers the slicer's own estimate, taken from the file's metadata, and shows the clock time the job should finish along with which source it used. Extrapolating from how much of the file has been read is very wrong early on — a six-hour print can sit under 1% for its first forty minutes — so that is only a last resort, after filament used, and only once at least 2% is done.

Job control

Pause, Resume, Cancel, and Restart sit on the Status panel, so they are on the dashboard by default. Each is enabled only when it applies — Resume is dead while printing, Pause is dead while paused — rather than letting the printer reject the command.

Restart cancels the running job, starts the same file again from the beginning, and pauses it immediately, so you can clear the bed or get set up before it lays anything down. It waits for the printer to actually stop before restarting, since Klipper refuses a new job while one is unwinding.

When the printer goes away

If Moonraker becomes unreachable, or Klipper shuts down or errors, an overlay explains what happened and stays until the printer is ready again. It offers Firmware Restart and Restart Klipper directly, which is usually what a shutdown needs. Dismiss it with Escape if you want the UI back.

Both restarts are also on the Settings tab, behind a confirmation, since they interrupt a running print.

3D view

The Move tab draws the build volume as a rotating wireframe with the toolhead marked. ◄ ► ▲ ▼ rotate, + − zoom, ← → ↑ ↓ pan, and Reset returns to the default view. Spin pauses the automatic rotation.

Model builds up a picture of the print as it happens. Positions are sampled from Klipper's motion report and a point is kept whenever the extruder axis has advanced, so travel moves and retractions leave nothing behind. Points are snapped to a 2mm grid and capped, which keeps a long print bounded; the model resets when a different job starts, and Clear empties it by hand.

Material is shaded rather than drawn in one colour: brightness combines distance from the viewer with height, which stands in for a light above and in front, and only the nearest point per pixel is kept so nearer material hides what is behind it. Without that the model is a flat blob with no readable depth.

The model is saved as you go and restored when you reopen, so closing klipper-tui mid-print does not lose what has been drawn. It is keyed to the job, so a different print starts clean. Clear empties it by hand.

It is a coarse picture, not a gcode preview — the sample rate is whatever Moonraker pushes, so fine detail is lost. It is enough to watch a part take shape.

Toolpath

The Move tab draws the current layer as the printer works through it: what has been laid down so far in the material colour, what is still to come dimmed, and the nozzle marked. Follow tracks the printer; −1/+1 hold a layer and step through it, and Fit reframes on the layer in view.

The gcode is fetched once per job and cached, then indexed to find where each layer begins — only the layer being looked at is parsed, so a thirty-megabyte print does not have to be held in memory. Drawing starts well before the download finishes: everything printed so far is in the leading bytes, so the current layer appears as soon as the transfer passes the print position, with the rest filling in behind it. Which layer is showing comes from the file position Klipper reports, so it matches the printer rather than guessing from height. PrusaSlicer, SuperSlicer, and Cura layer markers are understood, and a file with no markers is split on its Z moves.

Travel moves are left out. Drawing them buries the shape under straight lines between features.

Z offset

Live babystepping sits under the toolhead controls: nudge in 0.01 or 0.05mm steps while a first layer goes down, and the current offset is shown alongside the saved probe offset. Reset returns it to zero.

Save folds the live offset into the saved one — Z_OFFSET_APPLY_PROBE, or Z_OFFSET_APPLY_ENDSTOP where there is no probe — and writes it with SAVE_CONFIG. That restarts Klipper and stops any print, so it asks first.

Motion limits

Velocity, square corner velocity, acceleration, and minimum cruise ratio are on the Settings tab under Machine. They apply immediately with SET_VELOCITY_LIMIT and last until the printer restarts; Reset puts back what printer.cfg says. The cruise ratio is shown as a percentage, as Mainsail does, though Klipper carries it as a fraction.

After a cancelled print

When a running job is cancelled — from here, from Mainsail, or from the printer's own screen — klipper-tui offers to turn the heaters off. It only asks if a job was actually running and something is still hot, so a print that finished normally, or one whose macro already cooled down, prompts nothing.

After a restart

SAVE_CONFIG, FIRMWARE_RESTART, and a power cycle all clear the heater targets and lose homing. When Klipper comes back, klipper-tui offers to restore what was set before — heater targets and re-homing — and does nothing unless you accept. Nothing is offered if the printer was already cold and unhomed.

Settings file

Saved to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/klipper-tui/settings.json (usually ~/.config/klipper-tui/settings.json). The dashboard, theme, and webcam URL are written there by the UI. Two things are worth editing by hand:

{
  "presets": {
    "PLA":  [215, 65],
    "PETG": [260, 80],
    "ABS":  [250, 90],
    "TPU":  [250, 80]
  },
  "filament_length": 1000
}

presets are the material buttons, as [hotend, bed] in °C. These are easier to edit on the Settings tab, where adding or removing one updates the buttons straight away; the file is only worth touching if you prefer it. The shipped values are deliberately conservative, so set them to whatever your filament actually wants.

filament_length is the default load/unload distance in mm. The default of 100 suits direct drive; for a bowden tube use roughly its length plus the extruder path (1000 is typical).

Bed mesh

The probe count can be overridden per run from the Mesh tab — leave it blank to use the value from printer.cfg, or enter 10 or 10,15. The estimated duration is shown as you type, which matters: a 100×100 grid is 10,000 probe points and takes several hours.

If the axes are not homed, Calibrate offers to home first and starts probing as soon as homing finishes, rather than failing with "Must home axis first".

The heightmap fills in point by point while probing. This does not depend on the run being started here — open klipper-tui during a calibration, or start one from Mainsail, and it joins the run in progress rather than showing the previous mesh. Points probed before it joined are not shown, and it says so. The display returns to the saved mesh once the run finishes, or if probing stops without producing one.

Klipper's own limits are checked before anything is sent — a minimum of 3 per axis, lagrange cannot exceed 6, and bicubic needs at least 4 per axis. For grids larger than 6, set algorithm: bicubic in your [bed_mesh] section.

Dashboard

Any panel can be shown on the dashboard as well as on its own tab — toggle them on the Settings tab. Panels are created and destroyed as you toggle, so one that is switched off does no work. Settings are saved to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/klipper-tui/settings.json.

Webcam rendering

The webcam draws real images with textual-image. How good it looks depends entirely on the terminal:

--render auto (the default) detects support and picks the best option. gnome-terminal has no sixel support, so it falls back to half-blocks; run under konsole or xterm -ti vt340 for a true sixel image.

Pointing it at your camera

The webcam tab asks your printer for one still image at a time and redraws it, so it needs a URL that returns a single JPEG each time it is fetched — a "snapshot" URL. It is not a video stream.

By default it tries:

http://<your-printer-host>/webcam/?action=snapshot

which is where MainsailOS and FluiddPi put it. If your camera shows up in Mainsail, that address is usually already correct and you do not need to change anything.

If the tab shows a 404 or a connection error, set the URL on the Settings tab (s) — type it in, press Apply, and it is saved for next time. You can also pass --webcam-url, or set $KLIPPER_WEBCAM_URL. Reset returns to the default.

Finding the right URL. In Mainsail, go to Settings → Webcams and look at the configured camera; the "Snapshot URL" field there is exactly what this wants. Failing that, these are the common ones — try each in a browser, and use whichever shows a still photo:

Replace HOST with your printer's address. A URL ending in action=stream is the video feed — this app wants action=snapshot instead.

A camera bound to localhost. Some setups run the camera server listening on 127.0.0.1 only, so it is reachable from the printer but not from your desktop. Those work in Mainsail because a proxy on the printer forwards /webcam/ to it. Use the proxied http://HOST/webcam/?action=snapshot form rather than the port-specific one in that case.

The stream stops while the tab is hidden. A 720p feed is the heaviest thing here, and pulling it for a tab nobody is looking at starves everything else. It picks up again when the tab comes back.

Frame rate is set with the buttons on the tab. Frames come from the camera's MJPEG stream, which pushes continuously, so there is no per-frame request; the number shown is what is actually being decoded, against the cap you asked for. If the stream cannot be reached it falls back to fetching snapshots and says so.

Getting more out of the camera

Most Klipper images run the camera far below what it can do. Check what yours is actually configured for:

pgrep -a mjpg_streamer          # look for -r and -f
v4l2-ctl --list-formats-ext -d /dev/video0   # what the camera supports

A common default is -r 640x480 -f 10 on a camera capable of far more. On MainsailOS/OctoPi, set it in /boot/firmware/octopi.txt:

camera_usb_options="-r 1280x720 -f 30"

then sudo systemctl restart webcamd. Higher resolution is worth it in a terminal that draws real images (kitty, or sixel), less so where it falls back to unicode blocks. Bandwidth is the limit — if the delivered rate drops, step the resolution back down.

Notes

• Jog and extrude commands are wrapped as G91 … G90 and M83 … M82. Klipper keeps absolute/relative mode as persistent state, so a jog that errors out mid-script can otherwise leave the printer in relative mode and break the next print.
• Extrude, retract, and load/unload are blocked below min_extrude_temp (170°C), which Klipper would reject anyway.
• Load/unload use the printer's own LOAD_FILAMENT / UNLOAD_FILAMENT macros when they exist, and fall back to a plain relative extrude move when they do not.
• The mesh panel falls back to displaying a saved profile when no mesh is currently loaded, and labels it as inactive so a saved-but-unloaded mesh is not mistaken for an applied one.