Important
SownteeShell is a personal shell built around my Arch Linux and Niri environment. It is published as a project showcase and reference, not as a supported drop-in desktop or standalone installer.
Note
Video showcase coming soon.
SownteeShell provides the bar, launcher, control panels, notifications, lock screen, wallpaper system, capture tools, OSDs, power menu, settings, and system services for a complete Niri desktop session.
Its interface follows Material Design 3, with wallpaper-derived colors, real background blur, shared typography and spacing, responsive layouts, and motion that can be reduced for lower-power devices.
- Live Niri workspace and active-window tracking, including dynamic workspace creation.
- Drag-and-drop window reordering and movement between workspaces without focus stealing.
- Per-workspace tiled/floating switching from the bar.
- MPRIS media widget with playback controls, seeking,
LIVEstatus, animated empty state, and Cava visualization. - Configurable weather, battery, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microphone privacy, recording, DND, clock, and system tray modules.
- Unified fuzzy app search with dedicated modes for files (
f), clipboard (c), calculations (=), and emojis (e). - Full-screen All Apps grid with responsive sizing, animated filtering, and keyboard navigation using arrows,
Home,End,Page Up/Down, andEnter. - Clipboard history for text, files, images, and videos, with thumbnails, pinned entries, and optional direct paste.
- Emoji search and direct paste into the previously focused application.
- Lazy-loaded result providers and adaptive launcher geometry when no results are available.
- Calendar with Vietnamese lunar dates, event indicators, date/time pickers, and Google Calendar integration.
- Local tasks and Google Tasks integration, including create, update, complete, delete, and local-to-Google sync.
- Current, hourly, and daily weather from OpenWeather, with GeoClue-assisted location detection.
- Synced music lyrics and a configurable countdown timer with desktop notifications.
- PipeWire mixer with per-application volume, peak meters, mute controls, and input/output device routing.
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth management, advanced IPv4/IPv6 profile editing, and AirPods L/R/Case battery monitoring.
- Quick toggles for Airplane Mode, Caffeine, DND, Tailscale, Cloudflare WARP, night light, and power profiles.
- Display modes for internal, external, and extended layouts; internal backlight and external DDC/CI brightness; Sunshine capture-output profiles.
- Battery health, charge-preservation controls,
auto-cpufreq, live CPU/RAM/GPU charts, process management, and Arch/AUR update checks.
- Searchable GUI settings for both Niri and the shell.
- Niri editors for keybindings, layout, input devices, animations, behavior, window/layer rules, and raw configuration files.
- Shell controls for appearance, font selection, bar modules, launcher providers, notifications, wallpapers, capture, integrations, performance, audio, and OSD behavior.
- Independent background-blur toggles for the bar, launcher, Settings, and both control panels.
- Face-authentication management, idle and power policy, dependency diagnostics, and cache cleanup.
- Contextual Apply actions, with Reset shown only when a page has unsaved changes.
- Static wallpapers, video loops through
mpvpaper, and Steam Workshop projects throughlinux-wallpaperengine. - Integrated Wallhaven and Wallpaper Workshop browsers with filters, resolution and file metadata, downloads, installed-item management, and image/video previews.
- Playback policy that can pause wallpapers while locked or fullscreen and reduce video FPS on battery power.
- Staged video startup, cached frames, transition rollback, and animated crossfades to reduce backend-switching flicker.
- Automatic Material You palette generation through Matugen, with animated shell color transitions and optional propagation through the surrounding dotfiles templates.
- Cached wallpaper backdrops for consistent blurred desktop surfaces.
- Region screenshots with an in-shell editor for crop, freehand drawing, arrows, rectangles, text, blur, pixelation, undo, and color selection.
- OCR with English/Vietnamese language support and Google Lens reverse image search.
- GPU screen recording with configurable region, FPS, codec, quality, microphone capture, and CPU-encoding fallback.
- Grouped notification popups, actions exposed by applications, swipe-to-dismiss, expandable groups, and persistent history.
- Lock-screen notification stacks, scheduled DND, critical-notification handling, popup exclusions, history exclusions, and configurable retention limits.
- Multi-monitor PAM lock screen with password authentication, optional Howdy face recognition, and retry after monitor wake.
- Idle dimming followed by monitor power-off, with separate unlocked and locked timeouts plus Caffeine inhibition.
- Native Polkit authentication dialogs and volume, brightness, microphone, and media OSDs.
- Edge-drag gestures for opening the left and right control panels.
- Animated session menu for Lock, Suspend, Hibernate, Logout, Reboot, and Shutdown.
- Qt 6/QML user interface built on Quickshell singletons, loaders, and Wayland layer surfaces.
- Event-driven integration with Niri, PipeWire, NetworkManager, UPower, MPRIS, and StatusNotifierItem.
- On-demand polling and subprocess lifecycle control for weather, statistics, Bluetooth scanning, wallpaper discovery, and external integrations.
- Persistent settings and history use debounced or atomic writes to avoid unnecessary disk activity and partial files.
SownteeShell takes inspiration from these open Linux desktop projects:
Its foundation comes from the wider Niri, Quickshell, and Matugen communities.
Features that integrate with external tools or online services require their corresponding packages, permissions, credentials, and system configuration. Hardware-specific controls such as DDC/CI brightness, charge preservation, GPU encoding, and face authentication depend on compatible devices.