[HN Gopher] Quickshell - building blocks for your desktop
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Quickshell - building blocks for your desktop
Author : abhinavk
Score : 225 points
Date : 2025-08-05 16:18 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (quickshell.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (quickshell.org)
| zekenie wrote:
| Neat! What OSes does this support?
| pmarreck wrote:
| gonna say "linux only" given linux is the only OS this
| configurable
| jdiff wrote:
| Both macOS and Windows have alternative window managers
| available, although macOS does need to be mutilated somewhat
| heavily to make it happen.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Custom Windows shells go all the way back to Windows 9x. All
| you need to do is hide the task bar (or kill explorer.exe)
| and run your own replacement. Even Microsoft released a
| downloadable window manager of sorts with PowerZones and they
| added a registry key at some point so people could stop
| breaking their updates by replacing explorer.exe and just
| specify a replacement executable instead.
|
| Custom shells might break some shitty old programs relying on
| Explorer running as a shell, but the Windows 11 taskbar
| probably killed those off already.
|
| There are API differences between Linux and Windows of
| course, but nothing that Linux has that Windows doesn't. As
| this is based on Qt, a lot of API compatibility will probably
| already have been taken care of. It just requires someone to
| go through the effort of writing and maintaining their OS
| ports.
| RGBCube wrote:
| Currently Linux and I think BSD, and the creator has said he
| wants to support MacOS and Windows, though those will only be
| included in the paid product.
|
| On Linux and BSD, it supports Wayland and X11, though Wayland
| is better supported.
|
| ie, Quickshell will forever stay completely free for free
| operating sysems.
| oblio wrote:
| Weirdly, the fact that the Windows and MacOS versions will be
| paid makes me more optimistic.
|
| Customizing at least the Windows window manager isn't for the
| faint of heart and its architecture doesn't have a lot in
| common with Linux so such an effort is very far from a
| straightforward port, and as a result most Linux desktop
| software and especially stuff that deeply integrates with the
| desktop environment is basically never ported or the port is
| incomplete, buggy, short lived, etc.
|
| KDE4 was supposed to fully support Windows and 15+ years
| later I'm fairly sure that dream is dead.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I'd probably pay to skin Windows if it worked really well
| (fast and no flashes of unskinned stuff). I've wanted to
| tinker with that for ages but I don't even know where to
| begin.
| nosrepa wrote:
| Windowblinds works.
| accoil wrote:
| Windhawk[1] has some plugins for styling (using XAML). I
| don't really style anything apart from removing the
| "Recommended" section from the start menu, so I'm not
| sure how fast styles get applied.
|
| [1]: https://windhawk.net
| outfoxxed wrote:
| I expect Windows to be easier than Mac, especially if
| attempting to respect SIP, though I've not done much
| research yet and don't plan to until the Linux version is
| in a state I'm happy with or I'm forced to heavily use a
| Windows/Mac machine and need to make it bearable.
| actinium226 wrote:
| Looks nice!
| jdiff wrote:
| Interesting that the video being used as a showcase is dropping
| so many frames. Is QuickShell particularly heavy, the system
| recording particularly anemic, or something else? For the first
| half of the video I didn't realize QuickShell supported
| transitions at all and thought it only had hard cuts between
| different states. It looks like a very interesting project though
| and a worthy time sink, especially with those transitions being
| supported.
| LoganDark wrote:
| The video is 125fps (according to ffprobe) and appears smooth
| on my 120Hz display, so maybe you're the one dropping frames.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 125 fps should actually be a huge red flag, not that the
| video FPS is the be-all-end-all of what the render FPS
| actually was anyways, as that's extremely unlikely to be
| their (that is the recorder's) refresh rate. Since the other
| video has a different (but equally odd) refresh rate, we know
| it isn't their refresh rate for sure, which also means we
| know there would at least be judder (recording at a
| mismatched framerate from the content) or at worst drops.
|
| This all strongly hints to the videos being variable frame
| rate encoded. A quick dump of the timestamps with ffprobe and
| then a quick transform to the deltas seems to agree with this
| https://pastebin.com/raw/PbbNGBVy
|
| The most common frametime is 0.006945, which aligns with a
| 144 Hz target refresh rate. This makes sense as 144 Hz makes
| perfect sense as their monitor's refresh rate. Ignoring
| timestamp rounding differences, these are the inconsistent
| frametime buckets: 0.006945, 0.01389,
| 0.020836, 0.027782, 0.034726, 0.041672, 0.048617, 0.062508,
| 0.076399, 0.097235, 0.10418, 0.118071, 0.145852, 0.166689,
| 0.229196, 0.256978, 0.29865, 0.354213, 0.395886, 0.513957,
| 0.770935
|
| Watching a VFR recording of a 144 Hz desktop on a 120 Hz
| display may still seem smooth to you (after all, movies are
| 24 FPS and most online videos only 60 FPS) but it does not
| preclude frame targets being missed, as the data shows.
|
| VFR video is relatively uncommon as well, so I wonder if
| that's why people are reporting so many performance issues
| viewing the video with different setups. I.e. between all of
| the reports of stuttering, it's probably both the video
| itself and the devices trying to play the oddly encoded
| video.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Yeah, it's outstandingly smooth for a web video.
| egypturnash wrote:
| It's something else, in your connection or your computer. The
| video plays fine on the old iPad mini I'm using right now and
| shows transitions from the very first action.
| zahlman wrote:
| The page actually crashed my computer the first time. ("Why did
| you try again?" I've had the same issue with a couple of other
| specific things -- most notably the clipping interface on
| Twitch, which causes it reliably -- and I'm trying to figure
| out an ultimate cause; but I really don't know what I'm doing
| there.)
| lucideer wrote:
| fwiw in Firefox on my old Android phone I saw the same
| choppiness watching it in page but downloading & watching it
| locally it was smooth.
|
| On very fast WiFi & the video is only 2MB so I can only presume
| something in the page is competing for device perf.
| downrightmike wrote:
| FF is certainly choppier
| jmrm wrote:
| I can also watch it totally fine in a cheap recent Android
| phone at Firefox
| riidom wrote:
| To stay in loop with updates:
|
| Couldn't find the releases-only feed in Forgejo RSS, the blog
| seemed to be outdated and who doesn't use X or discord, here is
| at least a github-mirror where you can subscribe to releases:
|
| https://github.com/quickshell-mirror/quickshell
| nativeit wrote:
| > who doesn't use X or discord
|
| People with the privilege to make choices based on their
| values, and whose values include human rights, and freely
| accessible information (respectively).
|
| I wouldn't judge anyone who chooses to utilize either service
| (I still have accounts on both), but I can certainly understand
| why some would rather not.
|
| Thanks for the GitHub mirror link, that's probably where I'll
| start. Neat project.
| mshockwave wrote:
| I thought the original comment meant "_for_ who doesn't use X
| or Discord, here is the github mirror link". There's a "for"
| missing, and thus I think they agree with you
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| I really think that everyone is sleeping on QML.
| d_tr wrote:
| I'm not a fan of the language but QtQuick & QML is what I'd use
| for this type of widgets. OTOH I am starting two projects at
| work, one being a traditional desktop app and another being an
| HMI with lots of functionality, and decided to just go with
| QtWidgets and save myself from all of QML's JS influences and
| C++ interop boilerplate.
| conradev wrote:
| I love GitHub search because I can see how other folks are using
| Quickshell:
|
| https://github.com/search?q=quickshell+language%3Anix&type=c...
|
| This looks very cool!
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(page generated 2025-08-09 23:00 UTC)