nothingshell

A desktop shell for Hyprland, written in QML on top of quickshell. A vertical bar, a hover dashboard, a launcher, a workspace overview, a capture panel, a settings window, a lock screen and a matching greetd login screen — one process, no panel toolkit.

Arch is the supported distribution, and the support is the packaging rather than the shell: only there does install.sh install anything, through pacman and an AUR helper.

Install

git clone https://github.com/Tsunami43/nothingshell ~/.config/quickshell/nothingshell
cd ~/.config/quickshell/nothingshell
./install.sh -y     # packages, the hyprland.conf line, first start — no questions

The script appends the line that wires the shell into hyprland.conf itself. If you are doing it by hand, or turned that step down, here it is:

source = ~/.config/quickshell/nothingshell/hypr/nothingshell.conf

The login screen (optional):

sudo ~/.config/quickshell/nothingshell/greeter/install.sh

Dependencies

Three are required — quickshell, hyprland, qt6-shadertools — plus qt6-declarative and qt6-multimedia, which are QML imports rather than commands and so fail as an empty panel rather than an error. Everything else backs exactly one feature and its absence costs only that feature.

install.sh installs them for you: on Arch through pacman, and whatever the repositories do not carry (gpu-screen-recorder, matugen) through an AUR helper, if you have one. The full list, with the reasoning, is in the script itself. On other distributions it prints the list and leaves the installing to you.

Configuration

Most of it is in the settings window (SUPER+N, or the launcher's Settings entry): theme, wallpaper, font, displays, audio, network, VPN, Bluetooth, keyboard layouts, idle and lock, bar modules, notifications, capture defaults.

Everything the shell writes lands outside the checkout — in ~/.config/nothingshell and ~/.local/state/nothingshell — so an update never walks over what you set, and deleting the repository does not take your settings with it.

Removing it

The checkout is the installation, so removing it means deleting the directory. The order matters here, hence three steps.

1. The login screen, if you installed it — first, while the script that removes it has not been deleted along with the checkout:

sudo ~/.config/quickshell/nothingshell/greeter/install.sh --uninstall
sudo systemctl restart greetd    # kills the current graphical session!

It puts /etc/greetd/config.toml back from a backup and takes the copied shell away. Not the newest backup: the installer makes one on every run, including runs when nothingshell was already installed, so the newest one usually points right back here. What is wanted is the newest backup from before it — that is the one the script looks for.

2. The shell itself. Take the source = …/hypr/nothingshell.conf line out of hyprland.conf first: a missing file in a source is a hard error in Hyprland, so deleting the directory ahead of that leaves the next hyprctl reload walking into it. Then:

qs -c nothingshell kill                         # stop the shell
rm -rf ~/.config/quickshell/nothingshell        # this is the uninstall
hyprctl reload                                  # re-read the config, now without the source line

3. Settings and generated state live outside the tree and survive on purpose. If you want them gone too:

rm -rf ~/.config/nothingshell ~/.local/state/nothingshell

Licence, and what it does not cover

The code — QML, shaders, scripts, packaging — is MIT. See LICENSE.

A licence is permission you give for your own work, so the MIT grant reaches exactly as far as what is written here, and no further. Two kinds of file in this repository are not that:

The wallpapers (assets/wallpapers/*.mp4 and their thumbnails) are animated pixel art of existing games and films — Hollow Knight, The Last of Us, Pokémon, Cyberpunk 2077 among them. They were collected, not made here, so they carry their own authors' rights and their subjects' rights, and the MIT grant above does not apply to them. They are here because a theme without its background is not the theme; if that is a problem for you, delete them and the themes fall back to a flat colour, which is a supported state rather than a broken one.

The fonts (assets/fonts/) are redistributable, under conditions that are worth honouring rather than assuming: Inter and Departure Mono are SIL Open Font License, Material Symbols is Apache-2.0. Both licences require their text to travel with the files — currently it does not, which is an open item, not a claim that it is fine.

Dropping another .ttf/.otf into assets/fonts makes it selectable in Settings → Appearance without touching any code.