| title | About Otter Shell |
|---|---|
| sidebarTitle | Introduction |
| description | Native Wayland apps for a lightweight PikaOS desktop: shell daemons, utilities, and shared libraries. |
Otter Shell is a lightweight Wayland desktop for PikaOS. Apps are small native binaries. Each one does one job. They share Zig libraries so they look and behave the same.
Background daemons and overlays on your compositor:
Workspaces, clock, battery, volume, MPRIS, tray, and custom widgets. Fuzzy app search with calculator, emoji, and clipboard modes. Workspace cards, window tiles, search, and an app grid. Window strip for the current workspace (`otter-switcher`). Magnifying dock with pinned apps and window previews. Windows-style taskbar with Start, tray, and calendar. Extra bar widgets and launcher providers as `.so` plugins. Color-temperature daemon with schedule and bar widget. Per-display wallpapers with rotation and lockscreen support. Wallpaper-reactive colors in `generated-colors.conf`, plus optional app templates. freedesktop.org notification daemon. Drop-in for mako or dunst. Volume, brightness, and lock-key overlays. **Start here.** Apps, themes, and bar layout in the GUI. Wayland login greeter with PAM and fingerprint support. Lock, logout, idle, and polkit for session security. Wayland terminal with tabs, splits, shell integration, and URL handling. Local, SFTP, and SMB browsing with tabs, splits, and thumbnails. Native apt GUI with change previews and live progress. CPU, memory, GPU, disk, and network views with sortable process tables. Region capture, annotation, OCR, plus hardware-accelerated recording. Persistent history with search, pinning, and Super+V popup. Frame screenshots with gradients, shadows, and custom chrome. Markdown notes on a persistent layer-shell surface. Local AI chat on your machine (`otter-shell-extras`). On-device transcription and local TTS (via `otter-shell-extras`). Calculator, emoji picker, color picker, auto-clicker, timer, calendar, and weather helpers. Animated otter desktop pet with tamagotchi-style care mechanics. In-game overlay, telemetry, and benchmarks (`otter-gaming-utils`). Run `pikman install otter-shell`. Launch apps and bind hotkeys in a few minutes. Autostart shell daemons in your compositor config. Themes, bar layout, and app settings in otter-settings. Build from source and write apps with Otter libraries.