[!IMPORTANT] SownteeShell is my personal Arch Linux and Niri setup. It is tuned around my workflow, hardware, and services, so treat it as a showcase and reference implementation rather than a supported drop-in desktop.

Highlights

Desktop and navigation

• Niri-native workspace model with live windows, dynamic workspaces, overview-aware focus, drag reordering, cross-workspace movement without focus stealing, per-workspace tiled/floating state with a configurable default for new workspaces, and multi-monitor support.
• Dynamic Dock for pinned and running applications, with drag ordering, live window previews, focus-aware unread badges, right-click pinning, and overlap-aware auto-hide.
• Launcher and All Apps with fuzzy application search, a full-screen paged grid, horizontal touchpad navigation, keyboard control, contextual app actions, package-aware Pacman/Flatpak uninstall, and persistent drag-and-drop folders with rename and drag-out ungrouping.
• Search providers for files (f), clipboard (c), calculator (=), a unified emoji/Unicode catalog (e), and lazy KLIPY GIF (g) or sticker (s) grids when an API key is configured. Clipboard history supports pinned text, URLs, colors, file lists, images, and video thumbnails with optional direct paste.
• Configurable bar with workspaces, active client, media and Cava, weather, battery, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microphone privacy, recording, notifications, clock, and StatusNotifier items.

Panels, productivity, and system control

• Left panel with Weather, Music, Stats, and Timer: OpenWeather/GeoClue forecasts, MPRIS playback and volume controls, stable artwork, synced lyrics with seeking, system charts, process management, and countdown timers.
• A standalone, responsive SownteeShell Calendar with:
  • Week/month views, Vietnamese lunar dates, a current-time indicator with auto-scroll, timeline zoom, and filtered event/task search with jump-to-date results.
  • Multi-day drag-to-create with 15-minute snapping and time validation; drag-to-move/resize for editable, non-recurring timed events. Other entry types use their editors.
  • Event details, all-day mode, calendar selection, location, description, daily/weekly/monthly/yearly recurrence with intervals and end rules, one synced reminder, availability, privacy, and iCalendar preview/import.
  • Multi-account Google Tasks with list selection, colors, inline editing/completion, dated tasks, and independently visible device-local tasks.
  • Account/calendar visibility, background sync, last-sync status, and reconnect controls for Google, Microsoft, and iCloud/CalDAV, backed by Rust, SQLite, and Secret Service.
• Right panel with Notifications, Wi-Fi/Ethernet, Bluetooth, Display, Power, and Volume: hardware-aware network controls, IPv4/IPv6 profiles, Wi-Fi QR sharing, AirPods battery levels, and per-app PipeWire mixing with peak meters and device routing.
• Desktop and laptop power controls with detected power modes, startup defaults, idle/sleep settings, and supported battery features: health, charge limits, low-battery automation, and separate battery/AC policies.
• Display control with single-screen, Duplicate, and Extend modes, independent main-display and Niri startup-focus choices, and drag arrangement with a 15-second revert safeguard. Includes orientation, resolution, refresh rate, scale, VRR, multi-output wl-mirror mirroring with source/target and Fit/Fill choices, DDC/CI brightness, and Sunshine output selection.
• System telemetry with battery health and supported charge thresholds, power profiles, auto-cpufreq, Arch/AUR/Flatpak updates, live CPU/RAM/GPU charts, grouped process management, and RSS/PSS memory details.
• Quick controls for Airplane Mode, Caffeine, DND, night light, power profiles, Tailscale, and Cloudflare WARP, with edge-drag access to both panels.

Settings

• Searchable, responsive, resizable SownteeShell Settings with an MD3 Home dashboard, category shortcuts, palette preview, and animated tab transitions.
• GTK & Qt appearance and default applications: themes, shared icons, cursors, fonts, Qt styles/colors/dialogs, and preferred browser, file manager, terminal, editor, and image/video viewers. Settings synchronize across GTK, Qt, GSettings, and XWayland.
• GUI editors for Niri keybindings, layout, input, animations, behavior, window and layer rules, and raw configuration files.
• Shell controls for typography, bar modules, launcher providers, notifications, wallpapers, capture, integrations, audio, OSDs, idle behavior, and performance.
• Startup & Services with searchable Startup Apps, User Services, and System Services, live status filters, start/stop/restart controls, boot or login toggles, and Polkit-backed system actions. All three virtualized lists scroll independently on one fixed page, with search always visible.
• Per-surface blur, light/dark surface opacity, separate panel/component shadows, reduced motion, low-power mode, dependency diagnostics, and scoped cache cleanup.
• A shared profile image for Settings, Polkit, and Greetd, plus Howdy face-model management when supported.
• SownteeShell Connect for Wallhaven and Steam Community in Settings > Integrations, with themed sign-in windows and private, persistent website sessions. Expired sessions still require sign-in.

Wallpapers and Material You

• Static images, GIFs, and local videos, with isolated video rendering and memory reclaimed when playback stops.
• Wallpaper Engine support routes video projects through the native renderer and scene projects through linux-wallpaperengine, with battery-aware FPS and pause-on-lock/fullscreen policies.
• Scene properties from project.json: switches, sliders, lists, text, and RGB controls, with per-wallpaper overrides and renderer-only restarts.
• Wallhaven and Steam Workshop browsers with search, filters, cached previews, source links, installed-library management, and desktop/Greetd/both destinations.
• Wallhaven Collection save/remove stars and favorite counts; Workshop Browse / Subscribed / Installed tabs with Subscribe/Unsubscribe actions. Remote subscriptions remain separate from local downloads.
• Permanent drag-to-delete for static and animated wallpapers, with active-wallpaper protection and a replacement-before-delete flow.
• Frame-aware video handoff, cached covers, rollback-safe transitions, and synchronized live theme previews while browsing.
• Matugen-generated Material You colors with animated shell transitions, soft secondary/tertiary accents for monochrome wallpapers, and optional theme propagation through configured system templates.
• Greetd keeps its own background and palette, generated independently from its selected image or Wallpaper Engine video.

Capture and notifications

• A layered screenshot editor with pen, highlighter, lines, arrows, shapes, text, numbered markers, blur, pixelation, crop, eraser, zoom callouts, and a magnifier loupe.
• Transformable annotations and inserted image layers with move, crop, resize, rotate, opacity, visibility, z-order, edge snapping, automatic stitching, color picking, undo, and redo.
• English/Vietnamese OCR, Google Lens reverse image search, automatic clipboard export, and screenshot actions directly from the notification popup.
• Local QR detection via zbar, with multi-code previews and explicit copy/open actions; scanning never opens links or changes the clipboard automatically.
• GPU screen recording with region selection, configurable FPS/codec/quality, optional microphone capture, and CPU-encoding fallback.
• Grouped notification popups with application actions, priority-aware timeouts, configurable placement, direction-aware stacking, swipe dismissal, persistent history, scheduled DND, lock-screen delivery, exclusions, and retention controls.

Session and runtime

• Sowntee Horizon greeter for Greetd, a standalone Quickshell interface on Cage with installed-session discovery, network and battery status, profile sync, power actions, and wallpaper-derived colors.
• A responsive login card with an avatar that morphs on password-length edits and a centered, enlarged clock after ten seconds of eligible inactivity, without interrupting authentication.
• PAM error and lockout feedback, with a live countdown when timing is available. During a known lock, submits check status without sending another password or restarting the timer.
• Multi-monitor PAM lock screen with password authentication, optional Howdy face recognition, camera preview and device-aware V4L2 controls, retry after monitor wake, media, and notifications.
• Native Polkit dialogs, session and power menus, idle dim/lock/monitor-off policy, Caffeine inhibition, and position-aware volume, brightness, microphone, and media OSDs.
• On-demand QML surfaces, event-driven Niri/PipeWire/NetworkManager/UPower integration, a native image-cache provider, and persistent Rust Core and Calendar services with direct IPC, bounded jobs, and systemd-managed lifecycles.

Architecture

shell.qml              Entry point, IPC, screen variants, and lazy surfaces
Config.qml             Shared theme values and persisted runtime settings
StateManager.qml       Cross-surface state and open/close coordination
widget/                Bar, Dock, panels, desktop, capture, session, and Settings
components/            Reusable MD3 controls, effects, editors, and popups
service/               System, media, productivity, capture, and wallpaper services
backend/               Rust Core/Calendar services and on-demand Python/native helpers
plugin/                Native QML image-cache provider
scripts/               Shell integrations grouped by capture, connectivity, power, and theme

The Niri Settings pages target the include-based configuration used by this setup; they are not intended as a generic editor for every possible Niri file layout. Runtime settings and shell-owned caches are stored under $XDG_CACHE_HOME/sownteeshell with ~/.cache/sownteeshell as the fallback; Quickshell's own QML, shader, pipeline, and crash caches remain under its native cache directory. API keys and account credentials are intentionally absent from source defaults.

Dependencies

The main stack includes Niri, quickshell (stable package), Qt 6, Rust/Cargo, PipeWire/WirePlumber, NetworkManager, UPower, Matugen, Material Symbols Rounded, wl-clipboard, cliphist, FFmpeg, ImageMagick, and the capture utilities.

Optional or hardware-dependent features use Tesseract language data, GeoClue, Cava, gpu-screen-recorder, DDC/CI, Steam and linux-wallpaperengine, Howdy and V4L2, Tailscale, or Cloudflare WARP. Wallpaper website accounts additionally require pyside6 and qt6-webengine, with compatible Qt versions. The system greeter uses Greetd and Cage. Settings → Advanced → Dependencies reports which integrations are currently available.

Charge thresholds, external brightness, hardware video acceleration, face authentication, and device-specific battery telemetry depend on the machine and its drivers.

Inspiration

Design and workflow inspiration comes from DankMaterialShell, end-4's dots and Caelestia Shell.

Built on the work of the Niri, Quickshell, and Matugen communities.