dotfiles/quickshell

Takemi — YoRHa dark

A NieR:Automata flavoured Quickshell desktop for Hyprland, kept dark and lit like its wallpaper: a lone figure at a porthole, the void outside, one planet's light. The planet white for anything live, the hull red for anything wrong, grey-green for everything else. Hairlines, square markers, corner ticks, letter-spaced capitals, and selection shown by inverting the row. The bar, the rail and a thin border are one hull around the desktop, and the desktop is the porthole cut out of it.

Replaces Waybar, dunst and hyprlock.

Running

qs                       # starts the shell (Hyprland does this via autostart.lua)
qs -p lockpreview.qml    # the lock screen in an ordinary window, for styling

Hyprland starts it from ~/.config/hypr/lua/autostart.lua.

Layout

Two surfaces. Status moves off the bar and onto a vertical rail, because on a 1080p panel horizontal space is cheap and vertical space is not: a 48px rail costs 2.5% of the width, where another 48px strip along the bottom would have cost 4.4% of the height on top of what the bar already takes.

████████████████████████████████████████████████
█ ◉ │ 1 2 3 │ window title  ♪ TRACK │ CPU │ 20:04 █  bar   — 40px, part of the hull
█╭──────────────────────────────────────────╮ ▐▌█
█│                                          │ ▐▌█  rail  — 48px, part of the hull
█│                 windows                  │ ▐▌█
█│                                          │ ▐▌█
█╰──────────────────────────────────────────╯   █  frame — 8px left and bottom
████████████████████████████████████████████████

• hull — bar/Frame.qml: one surface round the whole screen, with the desktop as a rounded opening. The bar and the rail sit on it.
• bar — identity and workspaces on the left; the focused window, the player, the CPU/MEM/GPU readout and the clock on the right.
• rail — network, bluetooth, audio, mic, backlight, battery, tray, notifications, power. Popouts grow leftward out of it, into the screen.

Modules are divided by hairlines. BarPill is chromeless by default — a module is content inside the hull, not a surface of its own — and marks hover with an accent underline. Pass standalone: true for the rare thing that really is its own panel.

The shell uses three deliberate surface tiers. Chrome (the hull and ChromeSurface) is the calm, texture-free bar, rail, and tooltip layer. Transient (PopoutSurface) is reserved for expressive menus and detail panels, with one clear composition and stronger separation from the desktop. Cinematic (P5Backdrop) belongs only to scene-scale experiences such as power and lock; it is never used as decoration inside ordinary chrome or popouts.

shell.qml        entrypoint — hull, bar, rail, dashboard, power menu, toasts, OSD per screen
config/          palette, type scale, geometry, motion curves
components/      the primitives: panels, sliders, list rows, display text
services/        data sources, all singletons
bar/             the two surfaces and their modules
popouts/         hover panels hanging off rail and bar modules
overlays/        power menu, notification toasts, volume/brightness OSD
lock/            session lock
assets/          halftone and stripe tiles, generated with ImageMagick

P5Panel is the base surface everything sits on. It does not auto-size — callers set implicit sizes from their own layout (row.implicitWidth + contentPad * 2), which keeps the shape maths out of binding loops.

Popouts

Hover panels (components/Popout.qml) are part of the hull, not cards floating near their trigger. Each one sits flush against the frame edge it opens from, is painted in the hull colour, joins the frame through concave fillets, carries the rim round its open side, and slides out from behind the frame. PopoutSurface notices it is inside a Popout and leaves the fill and the frame to the hull; in the launcher and the ask panel it is still a free-standing panel with corner ticks.

Placement is explicit: centred on the trigger, then — if that would land the panel within dockReach of one of the opening's corners — docked into the corner instead, attached to the bar and the rail at once (dock is top, right, topRight or bottomRight). Without docking, a panel near the rail left a thin strip of opening between itself and the rail.

Dashboard

dashboard/Dashboard.qml is a drawer that slides down out of the underside of the bar — clock click, SUPER + I, or qs ipc call shell dashboard. It is painted in the hull colour and joins the bar through two concave fillets, so it reads as more of the hull rather than as a floating card (caelestia's idea). Four columns divided by hairlines: operator and time, the month, the system meters, and what is playing. Escape or focusing anything else puts it away; a HyprlandFocusGrab handles the latter, and Actions.dashboardClosedAt stops the clock click that cleared the grab from opening it straight back up.

Modules

Module	Where	Left click	Right click	Middle	Scroll	Hover
Sigil	bar	app menu	reload shell
Workspaces	bar	switch
Clock	bar	dashboard				calendar
Network	rail	pin details				state + networks
Bluetooth	rail	pin details				state + devices
Volume	rail	pin audio			volume	state + scroll hint + audio
Mic	rail	pin audio			mic volume	state + scroll hint + audio
Brightness	rail				brightness	state + scroll hint
Battery	rail	pin panel				power detail
Tray	rail	activate	app menu	secondary
Bell	rail	pin history + mark read				state + history
Power	rail	power menu
Media	bar	play/pause	next	raise player	next/prev	full player
CPU/MEM/GPU	bar	btop				resource dashboard

Popouts open on a short dwell and stay while the pointer is over the trigger or the panel. Hover openings remain passive. Clicking remaps a detail panel as a keyboard-focused popup: Tab moves through its controls, Escape dismisses it, and an outside click closes it. A shell-wide coordinator keeps only one transient surface mapped at a time, including tray context menus, so sweeping across the rail cannot stack several animated panels over one another.

Audio is the reference vertical-slice popout: current output percentage leads, output and input have distinct bands, and application streams form a subordinate mixer list. Output/input mute actions and Open audio mixer are explicit buttons inside the panel; scrolling the rail icons remains the fast level adjustment.

The power menu is fully keyboard-driven as well as clickable: Up/Down or J/K moves the active slab, Enter/Space confirms it, and Escape dismisses the screen.

Keybinds

Set in ~/.config/hypr/lua/binds/shell.lua:

• Super+Ctrl+L — lock
• Super+P — power menu
• Super+Shift+N — toggle do not disturb
• Super+Ctrl+Shift+N — clear notifications
• Super+A — ask panel
• Super+Shift+R — reload the shell

All of these go through Quickshell's IPC, so they work from any script:

qs ipc call shell lock
qs ipc call shell power
qs ipc call shell toggleDnd
qs ipc call shell ask
qs ipc call shell askAbout "why is the sky blue"
qs ipc call shell clearNotifications
qs ipc call shell reloadConfig

Ask

Super+A drops a panel off the top edge and hands whatever you type to claude -p, streamed token by token. It is the subscription that answers — the CLI already holds the credentials, so nothing here has an API key and nothing here has to be given one.

The panel is a chat, not a coding session. Settings sources, MCP servers and project files are switched off by default, which keeps a question asked from the desktop from arriving with the last project's hooks, CLAUDE.md and tone attached. The thread survives closing the panel; Ctrl+L starts a new one.

Key	Does
Enter	ask
Shift+Enter	newline
Ctrl+M	next model, written back to ask.json
Ctrl+Y	copy the last answer
Ctrl+L	new conversation
Ctrl+S	stop the answer
Escape	hide, keeping the thread

Configured in ask.json, watched and reloaded live:

{
  "model": "sonnet",
  "systemPrompt": "…",
  "keepContext": true,
  "settingSources": "",
  "allowedTools": ["WebSearch", "WebFetch"],
  "disallowedTools": ["Bash", "Edit", "Write"],
  "workingDirectory": "/home/narl",
  "maxTurns": 6
}

settingSources is the escape hatch: set it to "user,project,local" and the panel becomes your ordinary Claude Code, hooks and all.

Data sources

Hardware telemetry comes from fluxo, whose hardware modules are configured to emit raw pipe-delimited values rather than display strings — services/Sys.qml parses them and does its own formatting. The previous human-readable Waybar formats are preserved in ~/.config/fluxo/config.toml.waybar-bak.

Everything else is native: PipeWire for audio, BlueZ for bluetooth, NetworkManager for Wi-Fi, UPower for battery, MPRIS for media, and Quickshell's own notification server. These are event-driven, so the bar and OSD react the instant a volume key is pressed instead of on the next poll.

Lock screen

Authenticates through /etc/pam.d/hyprlock, which on this box is just auth include login. The visuals live in lock/LockFace.qml so they can be styled in an ordinary window (qs -p lockpreview.qml) without locking the session.

If the shell ever dies while the session is locked, the compositor keeps the session secured by protocol and there is no unlocker left to talk to — recovery means restarting Hyprland from a TTY.

What was retired

• waybar.service — disabled. Its config is still in ~/.config/waybar.
• dunst.service — masked, so it cannot be D-Bus activated and steal org.freedesktop.Notifications. Undo with systemctl --user unmask dunst.service.
• hyprlock — no longer bound. hyprlock.conf is untouched.

Optional

power-profiles-daemon is not installed (TLP is), so the power-profile switching in services/Battery.qml stays dormant. Nothing else depends on it.

The display face is Noto Sans, upright and widely tracked — the nearest free face to NieR's FOT-Rodin that is already installed. Change Theme.fontDisplay and everything follows.

Palette discipline

YoRHa dark: NieR:Automata's interface language, painted from the wallpaper (~/.wallpapers/space-1.jpg) rather than from the game's beige. Two hues, and hue is meaning; nothing gets a colour for decoration.

• Light (accent, #eef1ea) means live: the focused workspace, the selected row, the hovered control, a channel that is on, an unread badge. It is the planet's white, barely a colour at all — NieR marks attention with brightness and inversion, not with hue.
• Red (alarm, #c8684f) means wrong or destructive: critical battery, an urgent workspace, a critical notification, reboot and shut down. It is the hull's indicator lights, the only warm thing in the wallpaper.
• Grey-green is everything else, and that includes off. A muted speaker, a muted mic and Do Not Disturb drop to muted grey with their off glyph.
• Ink is the text on an inverted slab and the faint drop under display type.

Selection is the NieR cursor. Focus and selection invert the row: a slab of the light with ink punched out of it. Hover lifts the surface one step and brings the marker up to full light, but never inverts. Destructive-active is the same slab in red. The treatment* tokens in Theme.qml encode all of this; use them rather than picking colours per widget.

Markers, not slashes. The current row, a button under the pointer and the end of a header rule carry a small square (Theme.marker). Popouts are framed by corner ticks (Theme.tick) in their tone colour; the border itself is structure and stays neutral.

Flicker, not print. Display text (SplitText) is upright, tracked by Theme.tracking, on a one-pixel soft drop. The two ghosts either side of it appear only while glitch() runs — NieR's brief data-corruption flicker.

Texture is tiered. Chrome (bar, rail, tooltips) and transient panels (popouts, OSD, toasts) are flat. The hairline grid and the dot wash live only in P5Backdrop, behind the lock screen and the power menu.

Type has a floor. Nothing renders below Theme.fsMicro (10px).

Changing the palette. The colours are written once per program:

File	Covers
quickshell/config/Theme.qml	the shell: accent, alarm, the neutral ramp, the hull
hypr/lua/palette.lua	window borders, groups
alacritty/yorha.toml	the terminal
fish/conf.d/yorha_theme.fish	the prompt and pager

Everything else derives. glow is accent, and primary is plain text. Theme.heat() is a continuous text → light → red ramp, so a CPU figure that has gone red means the same thing as a battery that has gone red. Tray icons are flattened to one colour (subtext, the accent on hover) for the same reason: app brand colours wreck the palette faster than anything else in the shell. nm-applet and blueman are hidden from the tray, since the rail already shows network and bluetooth, but keep running as the secret and pairing agents.

The rest of the desktop

• Hyprland — hypr/lua/look.lua. No rounding, no blur, both opacities at 1.0, 1px borders. The active border runs from the light into the suit's grey; the inactive border is overlay. The shadow is soft and wide, so windows float in the opening rather than being printed onto it. gaps_out is measured from the hull's opening, since the hull reserves its own zones.
• Alacritty — alacritty/yorha.toml, selected by the import in alacritty.toml. Muted earth hues on the void; selection inverts. The Catppuccin and takemi.toml files are left in place, unreferenced.
• Neovim — still the catppuccin plugin, flavour mocha, configured in nvim/lua/plugins/ui.lua. Not yet moved to the YoRHa palette.
• GTK and Qt — still catppuccin-mocha-blue. Not yet moved either.
• Fish — fish/conf.d/yorha_theme.fish.
• The launcher — no external theming to keep in step, because it is part of this shell (launcher/). Fuzzel is gone; takemi-dmenu stands in for fuzzel --dmenu where a script needs a picker.
• No glass anywhere. Alacritty is opacity = 1.0, blur = false, and Hyprland's decoration:blur is disabled.

There are no gradients in the chrome; every fill is flat. Theme.sheen still exists as a no-op property so old call sites need not be chased down.

Geometry discipline

The hull. Borrowed from caelestia's screen border: the bar, the rail and a thin band down the left and along the bottom (Theme.frame) are one surface, drawn by bar/Frame.qml on the bottom layer, and the desktop is a rounded opening cut out of it (Theme.frameRadius). Read against the wallpaper, you are inside the ship and the windows sit in the porthole. The bar and the rail draw no surface of their own and ignore exclusive zones; Frame reserves all four zones itself, so every piece is placed from the screen edge.

Rectangles, everywhere else. NieR panels are plain boxes. Theme.skew and Theme.cut are both 0, so P5Panel, Skew and Geom all collapse to rectangles; the knobs are kept so a shape can be brought back on purpose. The porthole's curve is the only one on screen, which is what lets it read.

Motion glides. No overshoot anywhere: things ease in on OutCubic or OutExpo and settle. NieR's interface is calm and mechanical.

Each surface is one continuous slab, with modules divided by hairline rules rather than by gaps. A row of separate floating cards reads as clutter; that is what the dividers exist to avoid.