A minimal, beginner-friendly 2D graphics library for C.

SDL2 is a powerful foundation, but it asks you to manage renderers, surfaces, and event queues before you can draw a circle. Kitra sits on top of SDL2 and collapses that setup into a single header and a straightforward game loop, so a beginner can focus on building something instead of configuring something. It is not a game engine — there are no scenes, no entities, no editor — just a clean API for a window, input, and drawing.

A Kitra program looks like this:

#include <kitra/kitra.h>

int main(void)
{
    if (KitraInit(KITRA_SUBSYSTEM_ALL) != KITRA_STATUS_OK)
        return 1;

    if (KitraCreateWindow(KitraDefaultWindowDesc()) != KITRA_STATUS_OK)
        return 1;

    while (KitraIsRunning())
    {
        KitraBeginFrame();

        KitraClearBackground(KITRA_BLACK);

        KitraEndFrame();
    }

    KitraQuit(); // cleans up window, renderer, and SDL
    return 0;
}

Tested on Linux and macOS. Windows support is experimental — MSVC has stricter C compliance requirements that may require source changes.

The easiest way. One command installs SDL2 dependencies, downloads the latest release, and sets everything up automatically.

curl -sSL https://github.com/UniquePython/kitra/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash

Download the prebuilt tarball for your platform from the releases page. Then install SDL2 dependencies manually:

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-gfx-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev

# Arch
sudo pacman -S sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_gfx sdl2_ttf sdl2_mixer

# Fedora
sudo dnf install SDL2-devel SDL2_image-devel SDL2_gfx-devel SDL2_ttf-devel SDL2_mixer-devel

# macOS
brew install sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_gfx sdl2_ttf sdl2_mixer

Then extract and copy the files:

tar -xzf kitra-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
sudo cp -r kitra/include/kitra /usr/local/include/
sudo cp kitra/lib/libkitra.a /usr/local/lib/

# Install SDL2 dependencies first (see Method 2 above)

git clone https://github.com/UniquePython/kitra.git
cd kitra
cmake -B build
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
sudo cmake --install build

CMake:

find_package(Kitra REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(your_target PRIVATE Kitra::Kitra)

Makefile / manual:

CFLAGS  += $(shell pkg-config --cflags kitra)
LIBS    += $(shell pkg-config --libs kitra)

Raw gcc:

# Linux
gcc main.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs kitra) -Wl,--allow-shlib-undefined -o myapp

# macOS
gcc main.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs kitra) -o myapp

Then include the header:

#include <kitra/kitra.h>

The examples/ directory contains Pong, Snake and Pendulum built with Kitra.

Kitra is licensed under the MIT License.

Kitra was heavily inspired by raylib and its philosophy of making graphics programming simple and accessible.