dotfiles/quickshell/README.md

Takemi

A Persona 5 flavoured Quickshell desktop for Hyprland. Crimson, black and white, with no gradients anywhere. Everything leans by the same 14°, corners are chopped rather than rounded, and every surface is one continuous slab divided by hairlines rather than a cluster of floating cards.

Replaces Waybar, dunst and hyprlock.

Running

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

Hyprland starts it from ~/.config/hypr/modules/autostart.conf.

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 │ 42% │ 00:09 │  bar  — 48px exclusive
├────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                         ▐█▌│  rail — 48px exclusive
│                windows                  ▐ ▌│
│                                         ▐ ▌│
│                                         ▐ ▌│
└────────────────────────────────────────────┘

• bar — one slab: identity and workspaces on the left; the focused window, the player, the CPU/MEM/GPU readout and the clock on the right.
• rail — one slab: network, bluetooth, audio, mic, backlight, battery, tray, notifications, power. Popouts open leftward, into the screen.

Each surface is a single continuous P5Panel with modules divided by sheared hairlines. BarPill is chromeless by default — a module is content inside a surface, not a surface of its own — and marks hover with a crimson underline. Pass standalone: true for the rare thing that really is its own panel.

shell.qml        entrypoint — bar, rail, power menu, toasts, OSD per screen
config/          palette, type scale, geometry, motion curves
components/      the P5 primitives: panels, gauges, sliders, split-ink 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.

Modules

Module	Where	Left click	Right click	Middle	Scroll	Hover
Sigil	bar	app menu	reload shell
Workspaces	bar	switch
Clock	bar	pin calendar				calendar
Network	rail	pin panel	toggle Wi-Fi	nm-connection-editor		networks
Bluetooth	rail	pin panel	toggle adapter			devices
Volume	rail	mute	pin panel	pavucontrol	volume	audio mixer
Mic	rail	mute	pin panel		mic volume	audio mixer
Brightness	rail				brightness
Battery	rail	pin panel				power detail
Tray	rail	activate	app menu	secondary
Bell	rail	history + mark read	do not disturb			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. Clicking pins one open.

Keybinds

Set in ~/.config/hypr/modules/keybinds.conf:

• Super+Ctrl+L — lock
• Super+P — power menu
• Super+Shift+N — toggle do not disturb
• Super+Ctrl+Shift+N — clear notifications
• 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 clearNotifications
qs ipc call shell reloadConfig

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 Archivo Black, set italic almost everywhere. Change Theme.fontDisplay and everything follows.

Palette discipline

Crimson, black, white. That is the whole palette.

Changing the accent. The colour is written in exactly three places, one per program:

File	Line	Covers
quickshell/config/Theme.qml	readonly property color accent: "#ff2d40"	the shell
hypr/modules/takemi.conf	$accent = rgb(ff2d40)	window borders, groups
alacritty/takemi.toml	red, cursor, selection	the terminal

Everything else derives. accentDim and accentSoft come off accent via Qt.darker/Qt.lighter, glow (the hover highlight) is accent, and every Hyprland border, group indicator and focus state references $accent. Change those lines and the whole setup recolours — swap in Persona 4's yellow or Persona 3's blue and nothing else needs touching.

The rest of the desktop

• Alacritty — alacritty/takemi.toml, selected by the import in alacritty.toml. The Catppuccin files are left in place, just unreferenced. Near-black ground, white text, crimson cursor and selection. The sixteen ANSI slots keep their hues because syntax highlighters need to tell them apart, but every one is desaturated so nothing competes with the accent.
• Neovim — nvim/lua/takemi.lua, loaded through nvim/colors/takemi.lua so :colorscheme takemi and require("takemi").lualine() both work. Same palette, same rule: crimson is spent only on keywords, types and errors, functions are plain white-bold, and terminal_color_0..15 mirror takemi.toml slot for slot so :terminal matches the shell around it.
• Fish — fish/conf.d/takemi_theme.fish, with a preview copy in fish/themes/Takemi.theme for fish_config. Replaced the Catppuccin fish_frozen_theme.fish that fish 4.3 generated on upgrade. The prompt arrow is white and turns crimson on a non-zero exit — the shell's one "wrong" signal, and so the one place that earns the accent.
• Fuzzel — fuzzel/takemi.ini, selected by the include in fuzzel.ini. Square corners rather than the stock radius, and a fully opaque ground.
• No glass anywhere. Alacritty is opacity = 1.0, blur = false, and Hyprland's decoration:blur is disabled with both opacities at 1.0. Blur is the signature of the frosted-glass look, which is the opposite of flat ink on flat ground — and with nothing translucent left it was costing three render passes for no visible result.

White is the resting voice — text, icons, idle indicators. Crimson is the only accent and always means one thing: active, or wrong. Black is structure, used as a hard keyline rather than as a soft shadow. There are no gradients in this shell; every fill is flat. Theme.sheen still exists as a no-op property because a teal-to-transparent wash on every panel was the single biggest source of the murky blue cast the design used to have.

primary, glow, blue, ok and warn survive in Theme.qml only as aliases onto white, crimson and grey, so the existing call sites keep working — don't introduce new uses. warn used to alias accentSoft, which put a washed-out pink-red wherever something was merely notable; there is no half-crimson in this palette, so it aliases the real accent now and anything merely informational (brightness, most readouts) is white instead. Theme.heat() is a continuous white→crimson ramp, so a CPU figure that has gone red means the same thing as a battery that has gone red. Tray icons are force-flattened to a single colour for the same reason: app brand colours wreck the palette faster than anything else in the shell.

The wallpaper is teal. The UI used to be teal too, and the two fought each other into a blue-grey mush. Going monochrome-plus-red is what lets the wallpaper be the colour in the composition.

Geometry discipline

One angle, one chamfer, everywhere. Theme.skew is tan(14°) and every edge in the shell leans by exactly that, in the same direction; every corner is chopped by exactly Theme.cut. A vertical panel (the rail) leans its horizontal edges by a fraction of its width, which works out to the same 14°.

This is deliberate and was learned the hard way. An earlier pass gave every module a different lean, chamfer and height from per-index variance tables, on the theory that Persona geometry is "chaotic". It isn't — Persona UI is meticulously clean, and the chaos lives in composition and motion, not in each element being a different shape. Randomised geometry just reads as noise. If you find yourself adding a variance table, don't.

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