i'm looking to learn about the keys in monero, but i am missing something

i take the secret key from monero and use another tool to generate a public key from it

but this then doesn't match the public key from monero

Monero keys are very complex, there's a white paper on it I believe or you could find a youtube video that explains it too. Alternatively, someone with a lot of knowledge will eventually come through and blow your mind haha

Are you asking us to understand what that other tool does differently than monero ?

no. the other tool is only deriving an ed25519 pubkey from an ed25519 private key

and so it appears the ones from monero aren't exactly ed25519 keys as they're displayed i guess

You might have confused endianness, depending on how you get that key.

monero's is little-endian right?

most significant byte at the end.

I believe this is the opposite of Bitcoin.

you think if i turn around whatever the viewkey command tells me, generate a public key from it, turn it back around, i might get a matching result?

actually i am working with the hex strings so that probably doesn't make sense

Maybe. It's worth a shot based on what you said.

changing endianness didn't resolve this

recap: i output the viewkey in monero-cli, then i copy the secret key that it tells me

then i read the secret key as ed25519 into openssl and tell it to give me the corresponding public key

then the public key i get does not match the public key that monero-cli showed me alongside the secret key in the beginning