quiet by design

A sleek and minimal desktop shell thoughtfully crafted for Wayland, built with Quickshell.

Features a modern modular architecture with a status bar, notification system, control panel, comprehensive system integration, and more — all styled with a warm lavender palette, or your favorite color scheme!

⚠️ Note:
This shell currently supports Niri and Hyprland compositors. For other compositors, you will need to implement custom workspace logic in the CompositorService.

• Status Bar: Modular bar with workspace indicators, system monitors, clock, and quick access controls.
• Workspace Management: Dynamic workspace switching with visual indicators and active window tracking.
• Notifications: Rich notification system with history panel.
• Application Launcher: Stylized launcher with favorites, recent apps, and special commands (calc, clipboard).
• Side Panel: Quick access panel with media controls, weather, power profiles, and system utilities.
• Settings Panel: Comprehensive configuration interface for all shell components and preferences.
• Lock Screen: Secure lock experience with PAM authentication, time display, and animated background.
• Audio Integration: Volume controls, media playback, and audio visualizer (cava-based).
• Connectivity: WiFi and Bluetooth management with device pairing and network status.
• Power Management: Battery monitoring, brightness control, power profile switching, power menu, and idle inhibition.
• System Monitoring: CPU, memory, and network usage monitoring with visual indicators.
• Tray System: Application tray with menu support and system integration.
• Background Management: Wallpaper management with effects and dynamic theming support.
• Color Schemes: Catppuccin, Dracula, Gruvbox, Noctalia, Nord, Rosépine, Solarized, Tokyo night or generated from your wallpaper.
• Scaling: Per monitor scaling for maximum control.

• quickshell-git - Core shell framework
• ttf-roboto - The default font used for most of the UI
• inter-font - The default font used for Headers (ex: clock on the LockScreen)
• ttf-material-symbols-variable-git - Icon font for UI elements
• gpu-screen-recorder - Screen recording functionality
• brightnessctl - For internal/laptop monitor brightness
• ddcutil - For desktop monitor brightness (might introduce some system instability with certain monitors)

• cliphist - For clipboard history support
• matugen - Material You color scheme generation
• cava - Audio visualizer component
• wlsunset - To be able to use NightLight

There is one more optional dependency.
xdg-desktop-portal to be able to use the "Portal" option from the screenRecorder.

If you want to use the ArchUpdater widget, you will have to set your TERMINAL environment variable.

Example command (you can edit the /etc/environment file manually too):

sudo sed -i '/^TERMINAL=/d' /etc/environment && echo 'TERMINAL=/usr/bin/kitty' | sudo tee -a /etc/environment

Please do not forget to edit TERMINAL=/usr/bin/kitty to match your terminal.

paru -S noctalia-shell

paru -S noctalia-shell-git

paru -S quickshell-git

mkdir -p ~/.config/quickshell/noctalia-shell && curl -sL https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell/releases/latest/download/noctalia-latest.tar.gz | tar -xz --strip-components=1 -C ~/.config/quickshell/noctalia-shell

nix run github:noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell

{
  description = "Example Nix flake with Noctalia + Quickshell";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";

    noctalia = {
      url = "github:noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };

    quickshell = {
      url = "github:outfoxxed/quickshell";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
      inputs.quickshell.follows = "quickshell"
    };
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, noctalia, quickshell, ... }:
   {
    nixosConfigurations.my-host = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      modules = [
        ./configuration.nix
      ];
    };
  };
}

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    inputs.noctalia.packages.${system}.default
    inputs.quickshell.packages.${system}.default
  ];
}

noctalia-shell offers many IPC calls for your convenience, so you can add them to your favorite keybinds or scripts.

If you're using the Flake installation on NixOS, replace qs -c noctalia-shell with noctalia-shell

If you're using the manual install (git clone... and have it in ~/.config/quickshell/) you can just use qs ipc call...

Access settings through the side panel (top right button) to configure weather, wallpapers, screen recording, audio, network, and theme options.
Configuration is usually stored in ~/.config/noctalia.

The launcher supports special commands for enhanced functionality:

• >calc - Simple mathematical calculations
• >clip - Clipboard history management

For Niri:

debug {
  honor-xdg-activation-with-invalid-serial
}

window-rule {
    geometry-corner-radius 20
    clip-to-geometry true
}

layer-rule {
    match namespace="^quickshell-wallpaper$"
}

layer-rule {
    match namespace="^quickshell-overview$"
    place-within-backdrop true
}

honor-xdg-activation-with-invalid-serial allows notification actions (like view etc) to work.

Noctalia/
├── shell.qml              # Main shell entry point
├── Modules/               # UI components
│   ├── Bar/              # Status bar components
│   ├── Dock/             # Application launcher
│   ├── SidePanel/        # Quick access panel
│   ├── SettingsPanel/    # Configuration interface
│   └── ...
├── Services/             # Backend services
│   ├── CompositorService.qml
│   ├── WorkspacesService.qml
│   ├── AudioService.qml
│   └── ...
├── Widgets/              # Reusable UI components
├── Commons/              # Shared utilities
├── Assets/               # Static assets
└── Bin/                  # Utility scripts

1. Follow the existing code style and patterns
2. Use the modular architecture for new features
3. Implement proper error handling and logging
4. Test with both Hyprland and Niri compositors (if applicable)

Contributions are welcome! Don't worry about being perfect - every contribution helps! Whether it's fixing a small bug, adding a new feature, or improving documentation, we welcome all contributions. Feel free to open an issue to discuss ideas or ask questions before diving in. For feature requests and ideas, you can also use our discussions page.

A heartfelt thank you to our incredible community of contributors. We are immensely grateful for your dedicated participation and the constructive feedback you've provided, which continue to shape and improve our project for everyone.

Special thanks to the creators of Caelestia and DankMaterialShell for their inspirational designs and clever implementation techniques.

While all donations are greatly appreciated, they are completely voluntary.

• Gohma
• PikaOS
• DiscoCevapi

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.