Command line

Inari has a small non-interactive command line for acting on an already running instance. It is what a desktop keyboard shortcut calls when global hotkeys cannot be grabbed.

inari doctor

Prints what Inari sees of your hardware: every SteelSeries HID node, its product id, USB interface and report-descriptor prefix, whether Inari's device table claims it, whether it can be opened, and — per candidate, in the order Inari tries them — whether the device answers.

Unlike the other verbs this one runs in your process and prints to your terminal, so it works when no Inari is running. It is read-only: it opens nodes and listens, and never writes to a device.

Usage

Inari - Linux audio routing and mixing

Usage:
  inari [--minimized]                 start Inari (--minimized: stay in the tray)
  inari status                        print channels, mic and active profile
  inari mute <channel|mic> [on|off]   mute, unmute, or toggle (default)
  inari volume <channel> <0-150>      set a channel's volume in percent
  inari profile <name>                load a saved profile
  inari --help                        this text

<channel> is a channel's label ("Chat") or its sink name ("sink_chat").
Everything but a plain start acts on the already running Inari; results are
printed by that process (see its log: Settings -> Logs).

How it reaches the running app

Inari is a single-instance application. inari mute chat does start a process, but the single-instance plugin hands that process's arguments to the instance already running and the new process exits. There is no second service, no socket and no daemon — the channel that already prevents a duplicate window is the same one the CLI rides on.

Two consequences follow directly from that:

• The window is not raised. A control command returns before the window-revealing branch, so a shortcut pressed in the middle of a game mutes the channel and leaves your screen alone. (A plain inari with no arguments does bring the window to the front, which is what you want from the application menu.)
• Output does not come back to your terminal. The hand-off is one-way: your process is gone by the time the running instance has an answer, so results are printed on that process's stdout and mirrored into the log file. Commands that act — mute, volume, profile — are therefore the useful ones. status is for a session where Inari itself was started from a shell, or for reading back out of Settings → Logs.

If nothing is running, a control command does not silently boot a whole mixer: it prints inari: not running - start Inari first and exits 1. --help exits 0, a malformed invocation prints the usage text and exits 2.

Arguments in detail

Targets. mic and microphone (any capitalisation) mean the mic chain. Everything else is matched against channels — first by sink name (sink_chat), then by label (Chat), both case-insensitively. Nobody should have to type sink_chat.

mute takes on, off or toggle; bare mute <target> toggles, which is almost always what a shortcut wants.

volume takes 0–150 percent — the same ceiling the UI enforces — and applies to channels only. Mic gain is set on the Mic tab.

profile takes exactly one profile name and loads it, exactly as picking it in the UI would.

Unknown --prefixed arguments are ignored rather than rejected: desktop files, session managers and the webview itself all append flags nobody asked for, and refusing to launch over one would be a bad trade. An unknown word, on the other hand, is a typo'd subcommand and is reported as one.

--minimized is used by the autostart unit to boot straight to the tray; see Configuration & files.

Example: a desktop shortcut that mutes chat

This is the practical answer when a global hotkey registers but never fires on Wayland — see Hotkeys.

GNOME. Settings → Keyboard → View and Customize Shortcuts → Custom Shortcuts → +

Field	Value
Name	Mute chat
Command	inari mute chat
Shortcut	e.g. Super+F2

KDE. System Settings → Shortcuts → Add → Command or Script, with inari mute chat as the command.

Pressing the key toggles the Chat channel's mute. The Inari window stays exactly where it was — hidden in the tray, or behind your game — and the tray menu and the window both re-read the change, so nothing is left showing a stale state.

The same pattern works for inari mute mic, inari volume game 40 or inari profile Streaming.

Related

• Hotkeys — Inari's own global shortcuts, and why they sometimes cannot work
• Profiles — what inari profile loads
• Configuration & files — autostart and the files these commands change