Installation

Nicotine ships as a single binary. Pick your platform below.

Linux

1. Install the dependency

Nicotine drives your window manager through a small external tool:

• X11 and KDE Plasma (Wayland): wmctrl
• Sway: swaymsg (ships with Sway)
• Hyprland: hyprctl (ships with Hyprland)

# Arch
sudo pacman -S wmctrl
# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install wmctrl
# Fedora
sudo dnf install wmctrl

2. Install Nicotine

curl -sSL https://nicotine.rip/install | bash

The installer downloads the latest release into ~/.local/bin, adds a desktop entry and icon, and appends ~/.local/bin to your PATH if needed. Restart your terminal, then run:

nicotine start

3. Enable mouse and keyboard buttons

Nicotine reads mouse and keyboard input directly from evdev, which requires membership in the input group:

sudo usermod -a -G input $USER

Log out and back in for the group change to take effect. Mouse buttons are on by default on Linux; keyboard hotkeys are off by default (see Usage).

Windows

Download the latest Nicotine.exe from the GitHub releases page (Windows 10 / 11, 64-bit) and run it. No extra setup is required, since input hooks are native and there's no "input group" step. Your config is created automatically at %APPDATA%\nicotine\config.toml.

Build from source

Requires the Rust toolchain.

git clone https://github.com/isomerc/nicotine
cd nicotine
cargo build --release
# Binary: target/release/Nicotine

On Linux you can instead run ./install-local.sh, which builds the release binary, installs it to ~/.local/bin (with a lowercase nicotine symlink), and sets up the desktop entry. Building from source also opts you out of the anonymous launch ping, which is compiled in only for official releases (see Configuration).

First run

nicotine start

On first launch Nicotine detects your display resolution and writes a starter config.toml. Then open EVE, log in your clients, and they'll appear as previews.