caffyne shell is a modern, GTK-based desktop shell built on top of Fabric, Python, and GTK. It features a highly customizable drag-and-drop panel, fluid animations, and deeply integrated system applets designed specifically for modern Wayland compositors.
- Modern UI Architecture: Built with native GTK widgets running smoothly on Wayland.
- Dynamic Personalization: Powered by Matugen to deliver seamless Material You color palettes derived dynamically from your wallpapers.
- Interactive Control Hub: 15 pre-built applets covering everything from process management to a quick settings panel.
- Modular Bar Design: A highly flexible, drag-and-drop bar structure optimized for flexibility.
While caffyne shell does not manage window configurations itself, it connects natively to the following Wayland compositors:
| Window Manager | Status |
|---|---|
| Niri | 🟢 Stable |
| Hyprland | 🧪 Beta |
| MangoWM | 🧪 Beta |
For a rapid deployment on Arch Linux, you can stream the setup script directly:
curl -fsSL [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/caffyne-org/caffyne-shell/main/install.sh](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/caffyne-org/caffyne-shell/main/install.sh) | bashSee our Installation Documentation for a detailed step-by-step guide.
To launch caffyne shell automatically when logging into your compositor session, add the helper script to your compositor configuration:
spawn-at-startup "~/.config/caffyne-shell/start.sh"exec-once = ~/.config/caffyne-shell/start.sh-- Add this to your exec or startup table
hyprland.exec_once({ "~/.config/caffyne-shell/start.sh" })caffyne shell delegates keyboard shortcut assignments to your host window manager. You can toggle applets smoothly via an Inter-Process Communication (IPC) layer using fabric-cli:
# Example: Niri keybindings to toggle widgets
Mod+Space { spawn "fabric-cli" "exec" "caffyne-shell" "bar_manager.toggle('Launcher')"; }
Mod+N { spawn "fabric-cli" "exec" "caffyne-shell" "bar_manager.toggle('Notifications')"; }You can pass any of these identifier handles into bar_manager.toggle('<Applet>'):
Launcher,Settings,Notifications,Clock,Calendar,Weather,Media,Volume,Wifi,Bluetooth,Energy,Session,Calculator,Keyboard,Processes.
Contributions are always welcome! Please check the issues tab, follow our descriptive branching workflow, and submit a pull request.
Special thanks to @its-darsh (Fabric framework), @Axenide (backend clients), @linkfrg (Ignis runtime inspiration), and @amansxcalibur (UI code snippets) for making this project possible.