A DankMaterialShell daemon plugin that briefly shows the id and name of the workspace you just switched to, centered on that screen.
- Centered card with the workspace number and, if it has one, its name
- Small list underneath with the windows open on that workspace, one per line as
App · Window title(or grouped app names), folding the rest into+N more - Shown on the screen whose workspace changed, so it works per monitor
- Quick switching never queues: a new switch replaces the text immediately
- Fades and shrinks out after a configurable hold time
- Click-through overlay, never steals focus or input
- Styled like DMS's own OSDs: theme colours, corner radius, popup transparency, elevation shadow, blur and blur border, font family and size, animation speed, light/dark mode
- Configurable from the DMS settings UI: hold time, fade duration, text size, name on/off, label style, position
- One small backend file per compositor; every compositor DMS documents is covered
- Translatable; ships with Dutch
- DankMaterialShell >= 1.6.0 (uses the plugin translation API introduced in 1.6.0)
- One of the compositors below. A startup check refuses to enable the plugin anywhere else and shows the reason as a toast.
| Compositor | Switch detection | Window list | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyprland | workspacev2 event |
yes | tested |
| niri | DMS niri service | yes | tested in the testbed |
| Mango (mangowc) | DMS Mango service, tags shown as workspaces | yes | tested in the testbed |
| sway | i3 IPC workspace event |
yes, needs swaymsg |
tested in the testbed |
| Miracle WM | i3 IPC workspace event |
yes, needs swaymsg |
tested in the testbed (headless Mir) |
| labwc | ext-workspace-v1 | no (the protocol has no window mapping) | tested in the testbed |
| scroll | i3 IPC, same backend as sway | yes, needs scrollmsg |
untested |
| anything else with ext-workspace-v1 | ext-workspace-v1 | no | untested |
"Tested in the testbed" means the nested containers of dms-testbed; the author runs Hyprland.
DMS Settings (Mod + ,) → Plugins → Browse → Workspace OSD Flash, or:
dms plugins install workspaceOsdFlashUpdate later with dms plugins update workspaceOsdFlash; remove with dms plugins uninstall workspaceOsdFlash.
git clone https://github.com/AleBles/dms-workspace-osd \
~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/workspace-osd-flash
dms restartThen enable it in DMS Settings → Plugins → Workspace OSD Flash, or run dms ipc call plugins enable workspaceOsdFlash.
After an update that adds new files to the plugin, run dms restart once. dms ipc call plugins reload reuses Qt's cached directory listing, and a file that was not there when the shell started fails with File name case mismatch in the DMS log.
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hold time | 700 ms | Time before the fade-out starts |
| Fade-out duration | follows DMS | Set a value in ms to override the DMS animation speed |
| Accent border | on | Thin primary-coloured ring on top of the DMS surface |
| Text size | 44 px | The card scales with the text |
| Show workspace name | on | Include the name when the workspace has one |
| List open windows | on | One small line per window under the label |
| App lines show | Window titles | App · Title, or app names grouped with a count |
| App lines alignment | Left | Left-aligned block under the label, or centered lines |
| Max characters per line | 100 | Longer lines are cut with an ellipsis, 0 disables |
| Max lines | 6 | Further windows fold into +N more |
| Label style | Workspace 2: work |
Also 2 · work and name-only |
| Position | center | Center, top or bottom of the screen |
On Hyprland the DMS rename dialog (Ctrl + Shift + R by default) stores the name as <id> <name>. The plugin strips the duplicated id, so a workspace renamed to work shows as Workspace 2: work.
On niri the number shown is the workspace's index on its output, the same number the DMS bar shows. On Mango the active tag is the number. On sway a workspace that only has a name shows just the name. On labwc the desktop names from rc.xml are the names.
WorkspaceOsd.qml daemon: settings, flash state, the card, IPC; loads one backend
Labels.js label and window-line formatting (pure functions)
backends/WorkspaceBackend.qml the contract: `workspaceActivated(ws)` + `listWindows(ws, done)`
backends/HyprlandBackend.qml NiriBackend.qml MangoBackend.qml SwayBackend.qml ExtWorkspaceBackend.qml
StartupCheck.qml refuses unsupported compositors
The daemon maps CompositorService.compositor to a backend file (hyprland, niri, mango, and sway/scroll/miracle to the sway backend); anything else gets the ext-workspace backend. To add a compositor, drop a backends/<Name>Backend.qml that derives from WorkspaceBackend and add one entry to backendFor in WorkspaceOsd.qml.
Other tools can flash a message on a screen. Quickshell IPC requires every argument, so pass "" for the ones you do not need:
dms ipc call wsosd flash "Hello" "DP-1" "line one | line two" # text, monitor ("" = all screens), lines ("" = none)
dms ipc call wsosd flash "Hello" "" ""
dms ipc call wsosd hideEvery flash is logged as [WorkspaceOsdFlash] flash "Workspace 2" on DP-1 - 3 windows in the DMS log.
dms-testbed runs DMS in nested containers for all six compositors. With npm install (or bun install) done once in this repo:
npm run test:sway # start a nested sway with this plugin and switch to workspace 2
npm run test:all # all six, one after the other
npm run test:start # bring stopped containers back, same mounts, no recreate
npm run test:switch # switch every running container to workspace 3
npm run test:restart-shell # restart DMS inside each container (after adding plugin files)
npm run test:logs # the plugin's flash lines from every container's DMS log
npm run test:shot # screenshots/<compositor>.png right after a switch
npm run test:stopThe plugin ships Dutch (translations/nl.json); the English strings in the QML files are the source. DMS picks the file matching the shell locale automatically.
To add a language, create translations/<locale>.json (de.json, zh_CN.json, ...) with one bucket per English term:
{
"Hold time": { "Hold time": "Anzeigedauer" }
}Untranslated terms fall back to English. Reload with dms ipc call plugins reload workspaceOsdFlash and switch the language under DMS Settings → Locale to check. Pull requests with new languages are welcome.