Every colour is a measured one out of ddlc-palette, which reads them off ddlc.moe — nothing here is eyeballed
Note
Unaffiliated with and not endorsed by Team Salvato. The dialog box, the background and every line she says are theirs — see ASSETS.md
Came over from my rice, rokokol/huix
# render the config and read it, installing nothing
nix build github:rokokol/ddlc-hyprlock && cat result/share/ddlc-hyprlock/hyprlock.conf
The line types out a character at a time, wraps inside the box when it is too long, and garbles when a glitch fires — all three in nine seconds:
A wrong password is a glitch with a reason: the plate and the line break up, and the field says as much
The date is
date +"%A, %B %-d", so it comes out in whatever locale the session runs in — Russian in these shots
The box is a static image and the text is two labels on top of it. The engine renders a frame and writes it into stateDir — frame for the line, name for the plate — and the labels in the config are cmd[update:100] cat on exactly those two files, so hyprlock picks the frame up on its own poll. It is a rewrite each way rather than a signal because hyprlock's SIGUSR2 handler walks its timer vector without the mutex and allocates inside the handler, so pushing into a busy locker wedges it (hyprwm/hyprlock#539)
Typing is the Ren'Py trick: every frame renders the whole line and hides the part not yet typed in a transparent span. That is only half of standing still, though — a hyprlock label has no width and no corner to anchor to, it is placed by its own texture. So the frame is padded on every side that could move: blank lines up to the height of the text area, and a closing line of spaces wider than any line will be. With the texture size constant, halign = center plus valign = bottom pin the top-left corner of the text at the box's padding, and the line grows to the right instead of creeping out from the middle. All of it needs text_trim = false, which is why the config sets it
Geometry is computed in nix/config.nix from the dialog box's own 1280x720 canvas, and the width it gives the text area is handed to the engine — the wrap has to be the same number the labels were laid out at. A replacement dialogImage has to keep that canvas
One mechanism for two triggers: a wrong password, and a Poisson stream of spontaneous firings. Both garble the name and the text with mojibake, and both flash the whole screen — for a shorter time than the text stays broken. A wrong password arrives as a line from a journalctl -f follower, which is also what the loop sleeps on: no polling of the journal, and the reaction is immediate. glitch = false drops the follower and the stream both — the dialog still types, it just never garbles
The flash is the compositor's job, not hyprlock's, and flash picks who does it:
flash |
what it does | what to know |
|---|---|---|
hyprctl |
sets the shipped shaders/glitch.frag in decoration:screen_shader, and empties that option when the flash is over |
needs nothing but Hyprland. It empties the option rather than putting back what was in it, so a screen shader of your own does not survive the first glitch |
screen-shader |
hands the flash to screen-shader, which composites it over the effect already on screen and puts that back | set screenShader to the package, which selects this mode by itself |
none |
nothing, the glitch stays text-only |
Either way the clearing is on the engine's own clock, in the same loop that renders frames — no background sleeper that could outlive the lock, and a lock killed mid-flash still takes the shader down with it
quotesFile and reentryFile are plain text: blocks separated by a blank line, one line of dialogue per line, # for comments. A lock opens with a block from reentryFile — she notices you came back — and then draws from quotesFile, never the same block twice in a row. What is shipped is her Act 3 dialogue, verbatim
Two things in a line are substituted, both of them things she says about the machine she is on:
[player]—$USER, the name she calls you by[chr]—characterDir, the folder she names when she talks about where her character file is kept, the way the game names the one calledcharacters. It follows the directoryquotesFileis in: on this machine that folder is the one that actually holds her, so the backup she asks for is one you could make
{
inputs.ddlc-hyprlock.url = "github:rokokol/ddlc-hyprlock";
# in your home configuration
imports = [ inputs.ddlc-hyprlock.homeManagerModules.default ];
ddlc.hyprlock.enable = true;
}That enables programs.hyprlock, writes the whole config, and installs the dialog engine. It starts nothing — see running a lock
| option | what it does | default |
|---|---|---|
dialog |
the box, the typed quotes and the name plate. Off leaves the background, clock, date, layout and input field | true |
glitch |
garble the dialog on a wrong password and at random intervals | follows dialog |
flash |
how the whole screen flashes on a glitch: hyprctl, screen-shader or none |
screen-shader when screenShader is set, else hyprctl |
screenShader |
the screen-shader package, for that mode | null |
glitchShader |
the shader hyprctl mode sets — a complete Hyprland screen shader, not an effect body |
shaders/glitch.frag |
name |
the name on the plate | Monika |
characterDir |
what [chr] in a line becomes |
the directory quotesFile is in |
font |
the font every label and the input field are set in | Doki |
background |
the wallpaper behind the lock | assets/just-monika.png |
dialogImage |
the dialog box the text sits in | assets/dialog-box.png |
quotesFile |
what she talks about | assets/monika-talk.txt, her Act 3 dialogue |
reentryFile |
the topics a lock opens with | assets/monika-reentry.txt |
placeholderText |
what the empty password field says | <i>Give me it...~</i> |
failText |
what a wrong password says | This isn't it... ($ATTEMPTS) |
stateDir |
the directory the rendered frame is handed over in: the engine writes frame and name there, the labels cat them |
${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:-/tmp}/hypr-ddlc |
pollMs |
how often hyprlock re-reads that frame, ms. Also the engine's frame rate and one character of typing, and every tick costs a shell — a floor, not a knob | 100 |
lockCommand |
read-only, and the one thing you have to consume: the exact command that takes a lock | the engine, or plain hyprlock without dialog |
git clone https://github.com/rokokol/ddlc-hyprlock
cd ddlc-hyprlock
sudo ./install.sh # PREFIX=~/.local ./install.sh for a user installNothing is built: dist/ is the rendered config, committed, and install.sh only substitutes where the assets landed. Then take it and run a lock through the engine:
Package recipes can stage the same layout without leaking their build root into hyprlock.conf: DESTDIR="$pkgdir" PREFIX=/usr ./install.sh
cp /usr/local/share/ddlc-hyprlock/hyprlock.conf ~/.config/hypr/hyprlock.conf
ddlc-hyprlock lockThe engine finds the assets, the quotes and the shader from its own location, so nothing has to be set. Everything it does read is documented in ddlc-hyprlock help
Note
bash 5.2 or newer. The frame is rendered in pure bash — no fork per character — and both EPOCHREALTIME and the pango escaping depend on that version
The config asks for Doki, the game's own face, which is not shipped — a theme has no business installing fonts, and that one is copyrighted besides. Set font to whatever you have, or install Doki yourself and leave it alone. The geometry does not depend on it: the text is pinned by texture size, not by font metrics
ddlc-hyprlock lock starts hyprlock as its own child and animates the dialog until the locker exits. It never kills hyprlock, so the engine dying cannot unlock the screen, and it blocks for exactly as long as the lock — which is what an idle daemon wants from a lock command. lockCommand is that command, spelled out for whoever needs it:
services.hypridle.settings.general.lock_cmd = "pidof hyprlock || ${config.ddlc.hyprlock.lockCommand}";It is read-only because it is derived, not chosen: with dialog off it is plain hyprlock and there is no engine to run, so setting it by hand could only disagree with what is installed
A keybind should not call it directly — go through the session, so that everything that locks the screen takes the same path:
bind = SUPER, F12, exec, loginctl lock-sessiontests/run.sh # the engine, against a stub locker, journal, hyprctl and screen-shader
tests/run.sh --update # rewrite the goldens
tests/live.sh # the rendered config through the real hyprlock, without lockingThe suite drives the packaged command rather than the script, since the wrapper's defaults are half of what there is to get wrong, and it isolates HOME, XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and XDG_DATA_HOME — a session exports the last two, and the engine would otherwise publish frames into the live lock's state directory. It also refuses to run unless every stub is executable and first on PATH: a stub that is neither hands the test the real tool, and for hyprctl that means a live compositor instead of a log file
nix flake check runs that plus: dist/ is what the package would render, the packaged config has no placeholder left in it and reads the state files, and the Home Manager module is evaluated against option stubs — with the dialog on and off, because a plain lock has to be genuinely plain, and with a flash that has no compositor or no package behind it, because that is a warning and an error respectively
The stub locker sleeps and reads nothing, so none of that says whether hyprlock itself accepts the config. tests/live.sh hands it to the real binary and points it at a display that does not exist — hyprlock parses its config before it connects, so the parse happens and no lock does — then runs the engine and checks that every path the config cats is one the loop actually writes. It needs the real locker, so it never runs in CI
nix/config.nix the whole lock screen as data: geometry, colours, labels
nix/render.nix that attrset -> hyprlock.conf, for the consumers Home Manager cannot serve
nix/ package.nix, module.nix, module-test.nix
ddlc-hyprlock.sh the dialog engine
assets/ the background, the dialog box, and what she says
shaders/glitch.frag the flash, for the mode that needs no dependency
dist/ the rendered config, committed for consumers without Nix
docs/ the screenshots and the recording the README shows
tests/run.sh the engine's suite, with stubs and goldens
install.sh for systems without Nix
Doki Doki Literature Club is by Team Salvato. This is non-commercial fan content, and what every bundled file is comes from ASSETS.md. The code is MIT