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 and the login screen, 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 forty AI-generated images in that style.
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. Two themes draw the same modules: Modern as a figure with a caption, Analogue as an object.
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, Thunar’s 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 three styles, the island at its centre, notifications, the overview | 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, two themes, notes stacked along the edges | 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 |
| Lock and login | The shell’s own lock screen, and an SDDM theme that matches it | Lock and login |
| Settings | The one ordinary window, with profiles that keep whole desks under names | Settings |
| The terminal | kitty, zsh with oh-my-zsh, starship, fastfetch, and the programs run in it | Terminal |
| Other windows | GTK, Qt and KDE applications, Thunar, Zen, Vesktop, Spotify, VSCodium, imv | Applications |
packages/pacman.txt and
packages/aur.txt, and setup installs them with pacman and yay or paru.Most features rely on packages that are optional. A missing one takes its own control away rather than failing.