_{Click the banner to see a demo}

A liquid-glass desktop shell: a bar, and panels that flow out of it.

Panels flowing out of the bar	The wallpaper picker (SUPER + B)
A tour	The Desk
The lock screen	Every theme: a notification, Controls, the Desk, Settings and Search

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vit·re·us (Latin) — of glass; glassy, transparent.

Vitreus is a desktop shell for Wayland, built on pleamar. It's a bar of frosted glass, and everything else (the calendar, the controls, the player, the launcher, a notification) grows out of it like liquid and folds back in. A shell that morphs instead of pops.

It runs on Hyprland, niri and pleamar-wm.

Warning

Vitreus is in active development, so things can change or break between updates. It was built with AI tools.

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🚀 Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/natepayn3/Vitreus/main/install.sh | sh

It asks before each step, and running it again updates Vitreus. On Arch it does everything; on other distributions it installs the shell and tells you what to add by hand.

Just want to try it? Add --test. Your current setup stays as it is, and ./install.sh --stop puts it back:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/natepayn3/Vitreus/main/install.sh | sh -s -- --test

Requirements, options, Debian/Ubuntu and setting it up by hand are in docs/INSTALL.md.

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⌨️ The keys you need

Keys	Opens
SUPER + Space	Launcher
SUPER + SHIFT + Space	Settings
SUPER + SHIFT + D	Dashboard
SUPER + D	Desk
SUPER + B	Wallpaper picker
SUPER + TAB	Workspace overview
SUPER + E	Files
SUPER + C / SUPER + SHIFT + C	Screenshot / screen recording
SUPER + L	Lock

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✨ What's inside

Everyday

• Three layouts: a floating island pill, a frame round the screen, or notches hanging from the top edge.
• Launcher: apps, files, emoji, clipboard, wallpapers, sums and conversions (5 km to mi), web searches (!yt lofi) and open windows (@).
• Controls: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, brightness, volume per app, Do Not Disturb, Caffeine, and power.
• Calendar with reminders in plain words (3:30pm Call mom) and the week's weather.
• Notifications with history, per-app rules and sounds, and quiet hours.
• Player with cover art and a live spectrum.

Bigger panels

• Dashboard: one screen of glass cards (clock, weather, notifications, system monitor, what's playing).
• Desk: a side panel with a focus timer, notes and drawing, a terminal, clipboard history, and Ask, an AI chat using whichever assistant you have (Claude Code, Ollama, Codex or Gemini).
• Wallpaper picker: a honeycomb of glass hexagons, or a row of cards that previews each wallpaper live.
• Workspace overview: a card per workspace; drag windows between them.

Apps of its own

• Snap: freeze the screen, pick a window or area, draw on it, blur out private details, and copy, save or drag it anywhere.
• Files: a full file manager in the shell's look (more).
• View: a picture and video viewer: flip through a folder, zoom, rotate, slideshow, edit in Snap, or set as wallpaper. The installer can make it your default viewer.

Around the edges

• Lock screen, a matching login screen (SDDM theme), and a polkit password dialog.
• Audio visualiser: the bottom edge of the screen rises with the music.
• Desktop: right-click the wallpaper for sticky notes, a webcam bubble, a clock and a system monitor.
• Night mode and a desktop clock.

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🎨 Themes

Glass recolours itself from your wallpaper. There are also Retro, UwU, Cyber, Milkbox, Doodle, Paper and Proxy, each with its own shape and typeface. Pick one in Settings > Theme.

Want your own? Copy themes/_template.toml into ~/.config/pleamar/vitreus-themes/ and change the colours. How themes work

🧩 Add-ons

Extra widgets and panels you switch on in Settings > Add-ons. Vitreus comes with News & Weather, Home Assistant, TV Remote, VPN and an EQ, and you can write your own. Add-ons guide

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📸 Screenshots

Dashboard (SUPER + SHIFT + D) — everything at a glance, surfacing through the glass
Snap — click a window or drag an area, then draw on it, redact, copy
Controls — Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, brightness and volume	Calendar — weather, month, and reminders
Launcher — apps, files, commands, emoji, clipboard, wallpapers	Player and windows — hangs from the window title
System tray — an app's own menu, drawn in the shell's glass	Settings — the About page shows the build and updates the shell

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🆘 Something not working?

Run this. It works even if Vitreus won't install or start:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/natepayn3/Vitreus/main/bin/vitreus-report | sh

It asks what went wrong and writes one plain-text file you can read first. Your user name, computer name, network addresses and monitor names are blanked out, and it doesn't read your notifications, clipboard, calendar or files. Attach it to a GitHub issue, or e-mail it to natepayn3@gmail.com if you have no account. Once Vitreus is installed it's just vitreus-report.

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📄 License

Vitreus is released under the MIT License. It runs on pleamar, which is BSD-3-Clause and is not part of this repository.

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