impasto is a desktop shell for Hyprland, with the rest of the desk around it.
The shell is written in Quickshell and is most of the
code. The rest is the terminal, the prompt, two editors, two file managers, a
browser, a chat client, the login screen and the boot splash, all configured
to match. One
script, setup, installs all of it on Arch Linux.
The name is the painting technique the wallpapers imitate: paint laid on thick enough to keep the mark of the brush. The desk comes with thirty-three wallpapers in that style: photographs somebody else turned into the oil look.
One black island
A capsule in the middle of the bar rests on the time and changes shape into everything else: the glance, the control centre, the launcher, the overview, a notification, a game. Every module on the bar opens into it, and nothing has a title or a close button.
A desk under the windows
Any module can sit on the wallpaper as a widget, on a grid, in four shapes. Right-click the wallpaper to arrange them. Three themes draw the same modules: Modern as a figure with a caption, Analogue as an object, Sticker as die-cut stickers.
Colours from the painting
Pick a wallpaper and its palette reaches the island, the widgets, the terminal, btop, cava, yazi, neovim, VSCodium, the GTK, Qt and KDE windows, Nautilus down to its folders, Vesktop, Zen and Spotify. Or pick one of nine fixed palettes instead.
| Part | What it is | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| The island and the bar | The bar in four styles, the island at its centre, notifications, the overview; every layer classic, glass or liquid | The island, The bar |
| The control centre | Quick controls and the doors to every other panel, on SUPER A | Control centre |
| The launcher and the dock | Applications ranked by use, a calculator, windows, a countdown, the clipboard history; the pinned applications | Launcher, Dock |
| The desktop | Widgets on a grid, three themes, notes stacked along the edges, a sound spectrum on the grid or along an edge | Desktop |
| Capture | Screenshots, annotation, text from a region, screen recording | Capture |
| Notes and tasks | A deck of paper notes and a three-lane board | Notes and tasks |
| Games and pets | Eleven games played in the island, and five creatures on the bar | Games and pets |
| Keys and packages | Every key on one sheet; pacman and the AUR in one panel | Keys and packages |
| Virtual machines | Any system quickget knows, fetched, run and snapshotted from the island | Virtual machines |
| Development servers | Every port your projects listen on, opened, copied or stopped from the island | Development servers |
| Camera effects | Effects and gesture reactions on the webcam, through a virtual camera any call can pick | Camera effects |
| Screen time | The time spent in each application, by the day, the week or the month | Screen time |
| Lock and login | The shell’s own lock screen, which shows what is playing and opens for your face with an infrared camera, and an SDDM theme and a boot splash that match it | Lock and login |
| Settings | The one ordinary window, with profiles that keep whole desks under names | Settings |
The impasto command | The shell driven from a terminal or a script, answering in JSON | The impasto command |
| The terminal | kitty, zsh with oh-my-zsh, starship, fastfetch, and the programs run in it | Terminal |
| Other windows | GTK, Qt and KDE applications, Nautilus, Zen, Vesktop, Spotify, VSCodium, imv | Applications |
packages/pacman.txt and
packages/aur.txt, and setup installs them with pacman and yay or paru.
For a machine with no Arch yet, a USB stick, built on one
that has it, installs Arch and the desk together.Most features rely on packages that are optional. A missing one takes its own control away rather than failing.