Preview

Motivation

System customization is one of my favorite aspects of Linux. The freedom of choice that the Linux environment provides is beyond imagination. Over the last few years, I have experimented with vairous bars, launchers, and shell environments, but none of them really clicked with me. Ultimately, I decided to try building my own shell environment in Rust. My personal goals are to improve my Rust programming skills and explore new programming domains.

Overview

Ghost Shell is a desktop shell built exclusively for the Niri Wayland compositor. This project explores a combination of modern technologies intended to produce a small and resource efficient shell environment. The project's name is inspired by the anime Ghost in the Shell.

The project does not claim to be the best option on the market, nor does it aim to become one. I simply want to build a good tool that I will enjoy using on the daily basis. The project is currently in a very early stage of development, so it is not yet ready for general use.

The current goal is to implement the following basic functionality:

• Bar
  • Widget: System Menu
  • Widget: Niri Workspaces
  • Widget: Focused Window
  • Widget: Tray
  • Widget: Notifications
  • Widget: Camera
  • Widget: Audio Control (Speakers/Microfone)
  • Widget: Bluetooth Control
  • Widget: Network Control (Wifi/Ethernet)
  • Widget: Power Control (Battery/CPU modes)
  • Widget: Clock
  • Widget: Screenshot & Screen recording
  • Widget: Theme Polarity Changer
  • Widget: Weather
• App Launcher
  • App Search
  • File Search
• Lock Screen
• Clipboard
• Wallpapers
• Theming

Getting Started

Prerequisities

Development is currently intended for NixOS systems. There are no plans to support other systems at this time.

Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/thatwhichisdev/ghost-shell

Developing

To enter a development environment with all the necessary tools, run:

nix develop

Building

cargo build  

Running

cargo run   

Configuration

Ghost Shell discovers its configuration according to the XDG Base Directory Specification. I keep my configuration at ~/.config/ghost-shell/config.toml.

Here is an example of the current configuration:

[general]
font_family = "BerkeleyMono Nerd Font Mono"
font_size = 13
fg = 0xffffffff
bg = 0x00000000

[bar."eDP-1"]
output = "eDP-1"
height = 27.0
exclusive_zone = 27.0

[bar."DP-1"]
output = "DP-1"
height = 27.0
exclusive_zone = 27.0

[clock]
format = "%H:%M"

Licensing

The code in this project is licensed under the MIT License. Check the LICENSE file for further details.