Arguments & Environment

The Kaba client takes almost no command-line arguments. It is configured through Settings, and for a few low-level switches, through environment variables.

Arguments

kaba [URL | FILE]

Argument	Behaviour
A URL with a scheme, such as https://example.com or kaba://terminal/	Opened in Kaba.
A path to an .html, .htm, .xhtml, .xht or .svg file that exists	Opened as a file:// URL.
Anything starting with -	Ignored by Kaba. Chromium and Node switches listed below still apply.

Only the first openable argument is used. Other file types are not opened from the command line; this keeps a stray argument from being turned into navigation.

Kaba is single-instance. Running kaba <url> while it is already open hands the URL to the running window and exits.

kaba https://example.com
kaba kaba://files/
kaba ./report.html

When Kaba is your default browser, links clicked in other applications arrive the same way.

Debugging switches

These standard switches are recognised:

Switch	Effect
--inspect[=port], --inspect-brk[=port]	Attach a Node debugger to the main process. A stale Kaba process still holding the port is ended first.
--remote-debugging-port=<port>	Chromium remote debugging.

Environment variables

Set these before starting Kaba. The most useful ones:

Variable	Effect
KABA_DEV=1	Development mode: unlimited stack traces, and the engine is started with --trace.
KABA_DEBUG=<category>	Extra logging for one area, for example ghost, tor or pane.
KABA_CACHE_DIR	Linux: where the HTTP cache goes. Default $XDG_CACHE_HOME/kaba or ~/.cache/kaba.
KABA_DOH=secure|automatic|off	Force the DNS-over-HTTPS mode at start.
KABA_PRIVACY_STRICT=1	Start with Lockdown on for every site.
KABA_TRUSTED_CERT_HOSTS	Extra host names whose certificates are trusted like localhost.
KABA_NO_PANE_DISCARD=1	Turn Memory Saver off entirely.
KABA_PANE_PLACEMENT=auto|column|split	How a new pane is placed.

Graphics problems on Linux are usually solved with one of:

Variable	Effect
KABA_VULKAN=0	Use OpenGL instead of Vulkan.
KABA_OZONE_PLATFORM=wayland|x11	Force the display platform.
KABA_GPU_DEVICE=display|igpu|dgpu|off	Which GPU the browser uses on a multi-GPU machine.
KABA_GPU_PROFILE=reset	Forget recorded graphics failures and try the best profile again.

Kaba also tunes itself: on Linux it detects your GPUs, picks a rendering profile, and if that profile fails to start with hardware compositing it records the failure and relaunches on the next one down. You should rarely need the variables above.

The complete list, including memory limits and diagnostics, is in the client environment reference.

Where settings are stored

What	Where
User data directory	Linux ~/.config/kaba, macOS ~/Library/Application Support/kaba, Windows %APPDATA%\kaba
Account settings	In the engine’s database, per account
Client log	kaba.log in the user data directory
Boot report	boot-report.json, written after each start
Crash log	crash-log.jsonl, created on the first process crash

To reset the browser engine’s caches and developer-tools state without touching your data, use Settings → Information → Reset Kaba Chrome Settings.

Configuration files

Shell integration for the terminal lives in ~/.config/kaba/shell-integration.sh. The engine reads config.toml from the same directory.