Changelog

6.4.02026-08-21

The desktop update. The shell has never done anything with the largest part of your screen: the bar is at one edge, the dock at another, and between them was a wallpaper and nothing else. Now there are widgets and shortcuts there — and they know what is in the picture behind them.

Alongside it, something that was supposed to be impossible: the focused window's own menu bar, in the bar.

Added

• The desktop. One surface per monitor, above the wallpaper and below every window, so nothing on it can cover something you are working in. Four widgets — a clock, weather, now playing and a system read-out — plus shortcuts to any installed application. SUPER+SHIFT+A arranges; drag anything, right-click to remove, right-click empty space to finish.

  Its input region is exactly the widgets and nothing else. A full-screen layer surface that accepts input swallows every pointer event that would have reached the desktop — scroll-to-switch-workspace, any mouse bind you have — and it does so silently, because there is nothing visible there to blame. Only while arranging does the whole surface listen.

  Positions are fractions of the screen, not pixels, so an arrangement survives a resolution change and a widget parked against an edge stays against that edge.

• The desktop knows what is in your wallpaper. Every desktop that has ever had widgets on it has the same failure: you choose a wallpaper because you like what is in it, and then you cover that part of it with a clock. Snapping to a grid does not help, because a grid does not know where the subject is.

  So the wallpaper is measured. New widgets are placed in the calm parts of the picture, dragging shows the busy areas as keep-clear shading, and a widget dropped on the subject moves aside — unless you hold shift, which places it exactly and pins it there for good. And a widget that lands on busy ground grows a backdrop; on calm ground it is bare text on your picture, which is the entire point of putting it on a wallpaper you chose.

  A moving wallpaper is read as a picture — the still the index already extracts for the picker. No video is ever decoded for this.

  Getting there took four attempts, and the failures are the interesting part. Measuring detail alone put the widget on the character's face on two wallpapers in twelve, because cel-shaded skin is the smoothest region in the frame and a detail map reads it as empty. Adding skin-tone detection made it worse — anime skin hue matches every warm background. What fixed it was morphology: a smooth face is a hole inside a busy object, not open space. Eleven of twelve now, and the twelfth is a solid black silhouette on white, which genuinely has nothing to measure. It is advice, never a rule, which is why anything it decides you can overrule with one drag.

• When the wallpaper changes, the desktop follows it. Three settings: rescue moves only what a new picture actually covers and only as far as it must — often nothing, which is correct; arrange re-places everything in the calmest space of every new wallpaper; off. Pinned widgets never move under any of them.

• The global menu. The focused window's own menu bar, drawn in the bar in place of the window title, for as long as the focused window has one.

  This was researched once before and called impossible, and half of that was right. The usual plumbing — DBusMenu plus the AppMenu registrar — keys every menu by an X11 window id, which does not exist under Wayland; KDE's protocol for it is not implemented by Hyprland and neither is the GTK equivalent. That road really is closed. But accessibility publishes the same menus addressed by process, and a process is something Hyprland will happily tell us about. Qt, GTK, KDE and LibreOffice hand over their entire menu tree, nested submenus included, for free.

  It is invisible unless it has something to say. Most windows export no menu bar — a terminal has none, GTK4 apps put everything behind a hamburger — and a global menu that answers those with an empty strip is worse than none at all, so the title simply comes back. The workspace pills stand down while a menu is showing, because a menu bar is long and it is the thing you are using right now.

  Firefox is a special case handled specially. It reports its menu labels but builds each menu only when it is first opened, and opening it is visible — the browser's own menu appears on screen. So it is opened where nobody is looking: a window on a workspace you are not on is still mapped and still answers, so its menus are read out of sight and are simply there by the time you click. Nothing is ever opened on a window you can see.

  Electron is not supported, and that is a decision rather than a gap: it builds no accessibility tree unless started with a flag, and VS Code draws its own menu bar two pixels from where ours would go.

Changed

• Widgets are instrument read-outs, not cards. Every desktop-widget convention — a rounded translucent tile with a shadow — is the thing this shell's own components already refuse: depth here comes from rules and background steps, never shadow, never translucency. So a widget is a tracked label, a hairline, and a figure, built from the same IndKpi, IndLabel and IndSpark the bar and the panels are made of. On the clock the accent segment of that hairline is not decoration — it is the minute, filling as it passes.

  Each one takes a colour, a ground, an alignment and a size, in the same vocabulary the Bar Widgets tab already uses. The figure's colour still states a fact rather than a preference: a load that has gone critical says so even if you asked for green.

Fixed

• The desktop arrangement could silently lose everything on it. The surface serialised its own copy of the arrangement — a copy made whenever it last read the file — so any moment that copy was stale, the next drag wrote the stale version over the real one. Five widgets became one, with no error anywhere.

  The surface no longer writes the file at all. Every change is a request to the one program that owns it, which reads, edits and writes back. Emptying the arrangement now has to be asked for, and every write leaves the previous one in desktop.json.bak.

Notes

• One arrangement is shared across monitors. Correct on a single screen, wrong on two; it is the first thing to fix.

• at-spi2-core and python-gobject are new dependencies, for the global menu.

6.3.12026-08-21

A wallpaper patch. Sorting your wallpapers into folders broke every image in the picker, a greyscale wallpaper handed the desktop an invented accent, and previewing motion cost more than it was worth.

Fixed

• Sorting your wallpapers into folders broke every image in the picker. A path is not a URL, and "file://" + path was how every wallpaper surface built one. The moment a path contains a percent sign that breaks, because that is where an escape sequence starts — Qt reads %16 as a single byte and opens a filename nobody has. The indexer keys its thumbnail cache on subfolder%name, so the day you put your wallpapers in subfolders, every still, every rail thumbnail, the flying cartridge and the previews in Settings and the first-run tour all quietly stopped loading and the picker came up as a row of empty boxes.

  It is Tok.fileUrl() now, in the singleton every surface already imports, and it encodes each path segment rather than the whole string so the separators survive. Seven call sites were building URLs by hand; none are. Spaces and # in a wallpaper path had exactly the same problem and had had it all along.

• A greyscale wallpaper got an invented accent. Material's palette generation always returns a hue, including from an image that has none: a monochrome wallpaper came back green and a black-and-white manga page came back blue. Both arbitrary, and a green desktop under a greyscale picture reads as a bug because it is one.

  The image's chroma is measured first now — the distance of its mean a\/b\ from neutral in LAB, not HSL saturation, which reads 0.81 for a page made of near-white and near-black pixels because S is ill-defined at both ends of lightness. Across a real twelve-wallpaper library the ones with colour in them sit at 0.013–0.22 and the two genuinely monochrome ones at 0.004, so the gate is 0.008. Below it your own accent stands, exactly as if match-colours were off. A picture with no colour in it does not get to invent one.

• A white accent was drawn blue. Pick pure white — or any grey — and the shell drew #386375, a muted blue, from an input with no blue in it. Two rules conspired: hslHue is -1 for anything colourless, so the fallback handed it 0.55, and the saturation floor then pulled it up from 0 to 0.35. Every grey came out as the same blue.

  The floor is right for a washed-out colour, which is what it was written for — a pale pink at L≈0.80 has a hue worth keeping and simply cannot carry text. It is wrong for a colour with no hue at all, where it does not rescue an accent, it invents one. No chroma, no hue: the accent becomes a neutral of the same readable lightness, and the tint comes out of the grounds, inks and rules with it so the shell goes properly monochrome rather than accent-grey on faintly blue panels. For any accent with real colour in it, every value is bit-identical to before.

• Picking an accent by hand did not stick. With auto colours from wallpaper left on, the swatch you chose was written and then had a colour re-derived from the wallpaper over the top of it a moment later. Choosing a colour by hand now turns matching off — the same rule the light/dark source already follows, for the same reason: an override the next wallpaper silently undoes is not an override. Picking one of the wallpaper's own palette swatches leaves matching on, because that is choosing what matching would have given you anyway.

  There was a second hazard underneath it. saveAppearance() writes the config from its own detached process and the theme script reads that same file; started in the same instant, the script could read the accent you had just replaced and write the old one straight back.

• A Row in the lyrics panel had been disabled since 6.1.1. Its right-hand controls set anchors.right, and an item inside a Row may not set left, right, horizontalCenter, fill or centerIn — Qt disables the entire Row when one does, and says so on stderr where nobody was reading it.

Changed

• Motion in the picker is opt-in. A moving wallpaper no longer starts playing because you arrowed onto it. The still is the preview, and a play key on the deck — or ctrl+p — starts the clip when you actually want to see whether the motion is a slow drift or a strobing city. A key rather than a line of grey text reading "ctrl+p plays": the deck is covered in text and this is the one part of it you can press, so it is built like the rest of the panel, with a lamp that lights while it is running and the shortcut printed on it.

  This is also what made the picker quick. 6.3.0 opened in 1178ms, and ~693ms of that was constructing MediaPlayer and VideoOutput — one-time QtMultimedia plugin initialisation, paid per process, before a single line of the picker ran. It was paid whether or not you cared about motion. Now nothing loads a codec until you ask, and the picker opens in 216ms.

  It briefly lived inside the bar instead, to keep a warm decoder between opens. That bought 25ms over 216 and cost three separate state-reuse bugs — a surface that stops being a process stops getting its state reset by exiting, and the filter, the search and the commit animation each had to be put back by hand. Opt-in motion removed the reason for it, so it is its own process again and its state is reset the way it always was: by ending.

6.3.02026-08-21

The bar update. Every widget can be styled on its own now — its colour, what it shows, and whether it has a ground at all — the right cluster stops running into the media pill when it grows too long, and the bar finally says what the scratchpad is holding.

Around it: the theme can follow your wallpaper, clicking a link raises the browser it opened in and marks it in the dock, the settings panel stopped flashing white on the way in, and the wallpaper picker got its speed back.

Added

• Every widget can look how you want it. The Bar Widgets tab could move a pill and turn it off; it could not change one. Each now opens onto three choices — colour (the accent, or iris/green/amber/red/plain), shows (icon and value, icon only, value only) and ground (filled, outline, or bare). A widget you have touched carries a dot, and anything left at its default is not written to disk at all, so a config file still says only what you actually decided.

  The colour choice deliberately does nothing while an accent is already meaningful on that pill — a widget that turns amber to warn you is not overruled by a preference, because the colour is carrying a fact at that moment and the preference is not.

• The bar stops overflowing. With enough widgets on, the right cluster grew until it sat against the media pill and then under it. It now measures what it has room for — the gap to the centre, less the media pill's reservation — and pushes the widgets furthest from the edge out of the row, newest-out-first, until what remains fits. A ⋯ mark takes their place with the count on it; clicking it opens the Bar Widgets tab, because the fix is a decision about which ones you want, not something the bar should quietly make for you.

  The pushed widgets leave no gap, and the cluster's own width excludes them — the first version of this measured them anyway, so the survivors floated in from the right edge of a cluster wider than its own contents.

• The theme can follow the wallpaper. Auto-dark used to be one switch tied to the clock. There are three sources now — you, the clock, or the wallpaper — and picking the wallpaper reads the mean luminance of the still and sets light or dark from it.

  With a dead zone: under 0.42 goes dark, over 0.60 goes light, and anything between changes nothing. Measured against a real folder rather than guessed — eleven wallpapers landing at .28 .31 .41 .45 .45 .49 .51 .51 .52 .74 .94 — because the mid-forties is where a wallpaper is genuinely neither, and a naive midpoint makes the whole desktop flip on a wallpaper that is only slightly darker than the last one.

  Toggling the theme by hand sets the source back to you. A manual override that the next wallpaper silently undoes is not an override.

• Where the link went. Click a link in your editor and the browser opens somewhere you cannot see. The dock icon of whatever was raised now pulses three times, and the shell can follow you to it — Hyprland's focus_on_activate is off by default, which is the whole reason a link never brought you anywhere. Both halves toggle separately in Settings → Dock, because wanting to be told is not the same as wanting to be moved.

  Built on xdg-activation, which Hyprland surfaces as urgent. It fires twice for one link, so a 400ms guard collapses the pair into the single event it actually was.

• The bar says what the scratchpad holds. SUPER+SHIFT+\` sent a window somewhere with nothing on screen to say so, which made it a way to lose a window until you remembered the other half of the binding. A mark in the left cluster now carries the count, fills in when the stash is pulled down, and exists only while it is holding something — stash the last window and it removes itself rather than sitting there reading zero.

  It is not the special workspace put back into the workspace strip. That exclusion was right: the scratchpad is an overlay on the workspace you are already standing on, not a place you travel to, and focus({ workspace = -98 }) does nothing at all. The mark toggles it; it does not go to it. It reorders and hides like any other left-cluster widget.

• Mission Control shows the stash. A stash card at the end of the grid, with the windows inside it, whenever it holds any. Mission Control answers "where are my windows", and the ones in the scratchpad are precisely the ones no other card can show you. Choosing it pulls it down over where you are instead of travelling to it.

Fixed

• The settings panel flashed. Two separate mechanisms, both of them Binding:

  The panel previews your theme edits by binding over the live tokens. Binding's default restoreMode restores the value it captured when the binding activated — so closing the panel wrote a stale theme back over the shell. Switch to dark globally, open Settings, close it, and the bar was light again while the config on disk still said dark.

  The flash you actually saw was the other one. The panel reads appearance.json through an async cat, and the preview bindings were gated only on the panel being open — so for the frame or two before that read landed, the panel pushed its default mirror (light) onto the live tokens and the whole surface went white before snapping back. They are now gated on the mirror being fresh as well, and the tokens are re-synced from disk on the way out.

• The wallpaper picker took a second to open. 1178ms, measured. Not the QML — compiling all 1845 lines of it costs about 50ms, and the folder index costs 37 — but ~693ms of it was constructing MediaPlayer and VideoOutput, which spins up the whole ffmpeg backend before a single line of the picker runs. Importing QtMultimedia costs 20ms; building the objects is what pays.

  The player is no longer part of the window. It is built once the picker is already on screen, and in a folder that holds nothing moving it is never built at all. 1178ms → 299ms.

  Warmed after the surface is up rather than on demand, because reaching a moving wallpaper and waiting most of a second for the backend would only have moved the stall from opening to scrolling.

• The audio device lists lied about which device was in use. Picking a row in any of the output/input tables set the table's own selection as well as acting on it — and the caller binds that same property to the real system default. Assigning over a bound property destroys the binding, so from the first click the table showed your last click forever, whatever PipeWire actually did afterwards. The tables now only report; what is selected is what the system says is selected. (Same class of bug as the 6.1.0 toggle fix — a controlled component writing to its own controlled property.)

• A vertical bar drew a workspace chip reading -98. The horizontal strip has excluded special workspaces since 6.0; the vertical one never got the same line, so the first press of SUPER+\` put a 24px circle around a four-character label in it.

• appearance.json could be written torn. Four theme scripts wrote the config in place while the bar was watching the file, so a read landing mid-write lost a theme change. All of them write a temp file and rename now, which is atomic.

• The settings panel wrote its own config by hand. Eighty-odd keys concatenated into a JSON string and shell-quoted into a printf, where a mistyped property name produced undefined and JSON.stringify silently dropped the setting entirely. It is one object now, base64'd past the shell so no value can break out of its own quoting, and written atomically like everything else.

6.2.02026-08-19

The wallpaper update. The picker learned to search, the folder stopped being a constant, "previous" started meaning previous, and a video wallpaper stopped costing you memory while nobody was looking at it.

Around it: the bar can be pills or circles with the numbers written seven different ways and your distribution's mark on it, Mission Control became a map instead of a wall of tiles, and there is a first-run tour so none of that has to be found by accident. The DAC panel is gone — that work lives in Hub Moon now.

Removed

• The parametric EQ and the Moondrop DAC panel are gone. DacPanel.qml (2 325 lines), moondrop_control.py, sea-eq.py, the DAC bar pill, the dac IPC target and the SUPER+SHIFT+E bind.

  Two reasons, and the second is the honest one. Hub Moon is where this work now happens — a whole application built for the device, moving faster than a panel inside a desktop shell ever could, and keeping two implementations of the same hardware protocol in step was work that improved neither. And a parametric equaliser for one manufacturer's USB DACs is niche: it was the single largest file in the project, and most people running a Wayland shell will never plug in the hardware it exists for.

  What stays is what is genuinely a bar's job: output routing, per-app volume, media, lyrics, and the bit-perfect badge. That last one survives because the ALSA scan behind it was never a Moondrop fact — "something has taken the card and pipewire cannot see the audio" is what the screen recorder needs to warn that system audio will record silence.

  Nothing is lost by moving: Hub Moon reads the same curves off the same device, and it has the Moondrop Hub library, per-slot management and firmware-level detail this panel never had. The installer offers to fetch it for you.

Added

• A Bar tab. Bar-specific settings were sharing "Appearance → bar theme" with the shell-wide dark/light switch and the GTK/Qt app preference, neither of which is about the bar. They have their own tab now, and Appearance's first sub-tab is honestly called "theme".

• The bar can be pills. One continuous strip, or the clusters as separate floating grounds. Two, not three: the centre cluster is the media pill, which already has its own ground.

• Workspaces three ways — grow (a chip each, the active one stretching), pills (all the same, the active one filled, nothing moving) or circles (true circles that stretch into a true pill on the one you are on).

  Circles are the shape the bar used to have, and the reason it stopped having it is that grow's corner radius follows the roundness slider: at roundness 26 a 24px chip is a circle, and at 15 it is a rounded square. Circles take half the height instead, so they are round at any setting rather than only at the top of the slider.

• Workspace numbering. Arabic, Roman, Mandarin, letters, circled numerals, dice, or one dot each. Every scheme falls back to the plain number once it runs out of symbols, and a scheme whose glyphs nothing on the machine can draw is not offered at all — CookieRun has the circled numerals and not the dice, which is exactly how three tofu boxes get onto somebody's bar.

• The bar's mark is yours. It was the sea-shell logo, hardcoded. It now defaults to whatever /etc/os-release says the machine is: CachyOS and sea-shell are drawn as QML shapes so they recolour with the theme, fourteen more distros come from a Nerd Font, and anything else can be a custom image. Read synchronously, so it is right on the first frame.

• A first-run tour. Five screens, shown once, reopenable forever after from Settings → System. Everything in it was already in the control center — and that is exactly the problem it solves: twenty tabs, and a shell you installed four minutes ago gives you no reason to believe any particular one of them holds the thing you are looking for. The tour makes the four decisions that change how the desktop looks — light or dark, accent, bar shape, workspace style — and then says where the other nineteen tabs are.

  It writes as you go, not on finish. Every choice lands in appearance.json immediately and the bar behind the card changes while you watch, which is the only honest way to choose between "grow" and "circles". Quitting halfway keeps what you picked; there is no cancel, because there is nothing to cancel.

• The wallpaper folder is a setting. ~/Pictures/wallpapers was hardcoded in the cycle script, in the indexer, and by omission in the picker — three copies of a path that could not be changed at all. Settings → Appearance → Wallpaper now has a folder field with a folder browser behind it, and sea-wallpaper-index.py is the single place that answers "where are the wallpapers and what counts as one". Everything else asks it.

• Collections. The walk is recursive, so a wallpaper folder with any organisation in it is no longer indexed as empty. Each subfolder becomes a collection you can filter the picker by, beside the existing all / stills / motion chips. Four levels deep, hidden directories skipped.

• Type to search. Start typing in the picker and the rail filters live. The search window is built out of the deck's own parts — a raised legend plate, a sunken well, a raised counter — rather than a text field borrowed from somewhere else. Esc clears the query; a second Esc closes. m for match-colours moves to ctrl+m, because a bare letter is a search now.

• A recent filter. Tab cycles to it. It is an order as well as a set: the wallpaper on screen leads, then the ones you had before it.

• A day and a night wallpaper. Pin two and they swap on schedule — the same darkStart/darkEnd auto dark mode already uses, not a second pair of times. Chosen by clicking a cartridge and picking off a shelf of your actual wallpapers. It outranks auto-rotate: a pinned pair and a shuffle every thirty minutes are contradictory instructions, and letting the timer quietly overwrite the night wallpaper would read as the pair not working.

• wallpaper set over IPC. qs -c sea-shell ipc call wallpaper set /path/to/image runs the full sequence — path, daemon, lock screen, palette — behind the same travelling panel a keybind gets. Setting a wallpaper was previously something only the picker and the cycle script could do, because each carried its own copy of what it means.

• Stills-only rotation. Rotating into a video restarts a decoder every interval; some folders are mostly clips.

• ctrl+v imports. Everything here could choose a wallpaper and nothing could add one — the folder was filled by a file manager or it was not filled. ctrl+v in the picker takes whatever is on the clipboard (raw image bytes, a path, a file:// URI, or an http URL it fetches), puts it in the wallpaper folder without ever overwriting, re-indexes, and lands focus on it.

• Sort by newest. The index hands rows over in name order, which is the one order that cannot answer "what did I just put in here". ctrl+s, or the chip in the header. Not persisted, like the filter and the collection — all three are ways of looking at the folder for as long as the window is open.

• The lock screen can keep its own picture. sea-lockwall.sh ran on every apply and unconditionally overwrote the lock background with whatever the desktop had switched to, so "a different picture on the lock screen" was not expressible. Pin one in Settings — it outranks the argument the wallpaper switch passes in.

• A frame cap for moving wallpapers. mpvpaper's options were hardcoded. Capping a 60fps clip to 30 halves the full-screen blits the compositor does for it, which on a machine whose iGPU composites while the dGPU renders is the cost that actually shows up. It does not reduce decoding, and the setting says so.

Changed

• A video wallpaper is freed while a FULLSCREEN window covers it, not just paused. A paused mpvpaper keeps its decoder, its surface and its VRAM for as long as it lives, and the thing covering the wallpaper is usually a game that wanted exactly that memory. swww is already showing the same frame underneath, so the poster goes up before mpvpaper is killed and the swap has no black frame in either direction. Optional, and on by default. There is a matching "still frame on battery" for laptops, which the listener now notices within thirty seconds — unplugging the mains emits no window event, and window events were the only thing it used to listen to.

  "Covered" means fullscreen and nothing looser. The occlusion test used to also count a window sized to 95% of the monitor, and tiled windows adding up to 85% of it — both true of a single maximised editor, so it fired during ordinary work rather than during the game it was built for. It also pauses first and waits for a second opinion before killing anything, because going fullscreen is often momentary.

• Random is a bag, not a die. A fresh shuf every time repeats: over eleven wallpapers you see one twice long before you have seen them all, and nothing stopped it dealing the one already on screen. The bag deals without replacement and reshuffles when empty.

• Theme profiles are cartridges. Each saved preset now shows its own palette — the background steps, the accent as a band, its font and radius printed on the label — with a lamp lit on the one you are currently on. The row this replaces described a colour scheme as accent: #dbc0c8, which is the one format that cannot show you a colour scheme.

• The slot reacts now. The cartridge used to descend into a static black bar, and the only evidence the machine had taken it was the jolt. There is a shutter across the opening — two leaves in the plane between the bezel and the darkness behind, so the slot still reads as an opening when the picker is idle. It parts ahead of the falling card (130 ms against a 210 ms drop, so the way is open before the card arrives and the machine is never seen being hit by it) and snaps shut behind it, faster and with an overshoot, against the jolt.

• The flying cartridge has a label. It was an image with an accent border — anonymous, and a different object from the cartridges on the shelves in Settings. It now carries the same plate: filename, motion marker, keyed corner. The plate arrives during the anticipation dip rather than being there from the start, so the seam between rail panel and physical object stays invisible, and it is the only moment you can read what you are loading without looking somewhere else.

• The mouth throws a shadow. The clip boundary alone is a hard cut: the card was not swallowed so much as erased a row of pixels at a time.

• The lamp reads the cartridge. It used to go accent the instant you pressed enter and stay there, which says "busy" and nothing else. It is dim while the card is in the air, full at the moment of contact, and throws one ring at that instant. A lamp that lights when the thing lands is the deck responding; a lamp that lights when you press a key is the keyboard responding.

• Mission Control is a map of your monitor, not a wall of tiles. Every workspace card was a fixed 280x180 in a grid clamped to 1000x700 — so on a 1920x1080 screen three workspaces sat marooned in the top-left eighth of a full-screen overlay — and the windows inside them were fixed 122x60 chips in whatever order the compositor happened to list them.

  Cards are the monitor's aspect ratio now, and they fill the screen. Windows are drawn at their real positions and real sizes, scaled down from the actual geometry, so a workspace with a wide editor beside a narrow terminal looks like that. Which is the point: you recognise the workspace you want by its shape, in one glance, instead of reading four titles to find out which card is which. Arrow keys move the selection, 1-9 jump straight to a workspace, and an empty one says so rather than being a blank card.

• The picker, the keybinds, the rotate daemon and the IPC verb all route through one sea-wallpaper-set.sh. The picker used to write the config file, sync the lock screen, run matugen and call the apply script itself — its own copy of a sequence the cycle script also had a copy of, which is how the two drifted.

Fixed

• The wallpaper stayed frozen after the fullscreen window was gone. Three separate bugs stacked into one symptom, and each one alone was survivable.

  The listener guards itself with flock so only one copy runs. It resumes the wallpaper by spawning the apply script, which execs mpvpaper — and a child inherits open file descriptors, so mpvpaper held the lock for its entire life. Every listener started after that point silently lost the flock and exited, leaving nobody watching for the window to close. It closes fd 9 on every child now (9<&-), including the tick subshell.

  Underneath that, the socket race above meant that even a live listener had no working IPC to unpause through. And the freeze decision itself fired on any covering window, so ordinary work looked like a game — see the fullscreen rule under Changed.

• The frozen wallpaper, and the picker's preview, were visibly soft. Both showed the 1280px poster full-screen — a cache entry sized for a thumbnail rail, stretched to 1920 and wider. You saw it as a blur when a game let go of the screen, and as a half-second of mush before each preview started playing. The indexer now also cuts a native-resolution still (--fullposter, no scale filter, -q:v 2) and the freeze, the full-screen preview and the flying cartridge all use that instead. Measured at 101% of the playing video's edge detail: there is nothing left to see.

• A theme change could be lost, and then every surface drawn from the design tokens kept the old palette for the rest of the session. sea-toggle-theme.sh, sea-toggle-night.sh, sea-theme-schedule.sh and matugen-accent.sh all wrote appearance.json as json.dump(d, open(cfg, "w")) — which truncates the file to zero bytes before writing a single one of them.

  The shell watches that file. A watcher that wakes on the truncation reads an empty file, fails to parse it, keeps what it had — and no second change event follows, because the write that follows is part of the same change. The most visible casualty was the new first-run tour, which is drawn entirely from Tok.qml and would sit there in light mode on a dark desktop.

  All four write to a temp file and rename now, which is what sea-set-appearance.py already did and the reason it never showed the bug.

• A stale mpv IPC socket left the wallpaper with nothing able to unpause it. Restarting mpvpaper removed the socket after a fixed 0.2s sleep rather than after the old process was actually gone. Losing that race leaves the previous socket FILE on disk with nothing listening: mpv will not bind an address that already exists, so the new wallpaper comes up with no IPC, every pause/resume call fails silently, and a wallpaper paused before the restart stays paused forever. It waits for the process now.

• prev could not undo random. It found the current wallpaper's position in the name-sorted list and stepped back one, so after a random jump "previous" went to whatever sorted before where you had landed — somewhere you had never been. It now pops a back stack, exactly like a browser, and only falls back to name order when there is nothing to go back to.

• The bar started in the wrong palette on every launch. It flashed sea cyan — and, on a light-mode setup, the whole default dark theme — before settling into the real colours. Both config reads were asynchronous by construction: Tok.qml forked a shell to cat appearance.json and parsed its stdout, and shell.qml's own FileView started with an empty path and waited for a second sh to tell it where the file was. Everything on screen is a function of that file, so for the whole of those round trips the shell drew itself against the defaults. Both now read it synchronously with FileView { blockLoading: true }, so the first composed frame is already right.

  The subtlety that made the first attempt useless: with blockLoading the bytes are present when construction finishes and no load signal is ever emitted, so hooking onLoaded alone left the parse to never run and the flash exactly where it was. The parse is on Component.onCompleted as well.

• The scrolling media title was cut mid-glyph. The marquee clipped dead straight at both ends, so a long title showed half a character hanging at each edge — which reads as a rendering fault rather than as text continuing. It fades now, and only while it is actually scrolling.

• matugen re-decoded the video on every switch, and read the wrong frame. matugen-accent.sh ran ffmpeg -vframes 1 on the raw clip each time the wallpaper changed — 0.42 s per switch — while a 1280px poster of that exact file was already in the cache. And it took frame zero, which is precisely the frame the indexer avoids by seeking a second in: a great many wallpaper clips open on black, and a black frame hands the whole desktop a palette derived from black. It asks the indexer for the poster now. 0.42 s → 0.26 s, and the accent comes from a frame that has the picture in it.

• The poster cache never pruned. Twenty-two files for eleven wallpapers: eleven of them written under a naming scheme that predates the width suffix and unreachable by any code path, the rest belonging to wallpapers that had been deleted. poster() only ever created. Dead-scheme files go on sight; true orphans get a fortnight's grace, because that is also what every poster looks like the moment you point the folder somewhere else.

• The file browser started at a literal /home/miyukivigil — one specific machine's home directory, shipped inside the config.

• A wallpaper path containing a quote was a shell injection into the picker's printf. It is an argv element now.

Packaging

• The installer offers Hub Moon. Since the EQ panel left, "how do I control my DAC now" needs an answer at the one moment somebody is already installing things. It asks, defaults to no, and takes --hubmoon / --no-hubmoon to decide in advance. A piped install never prompts — silence is not consent, and there is no terminal to answer with.

  It resolves the latest release from GitHub at install time rather than shipping a pinned version that goes stale between sea-shell releases. /releases/latest excludes pre-releases, so a beta does not become everybody's install. On Arch it takes the package and hands it to pacman -U; anywhere else it drops the AppImage in ~/.local/bin as hub-moon, and says so if that directory is not on your PATH.

• install_moondrop_udev and its rule are gone with the panel. Hub Moon ships its own.

6.1.12026-08-16

Lyrics, four days of them in one afternoon. 6.1.0 shipped romanisation against a lyrics source that turns out not to have the songs it was romanising.

Added

• A second lyrics source. lrclib stays the first stop — keyless and fast — but its catalogue thins out badly outside Western releases. syncedlyrics now runs when lrclib misses, querying NetEase then Musixmatch, which is where the Japanese and Korean catalogue actually lives. Ape by RED in BLUE is absent from lrclib entirely; NetEase has it.

  The fallback searches artist and title, never title alone. It returns a bare LRC string with no duration, so the length check that guards lrclib results cannot apply to it — requiring both fields is what stands in for that.

Fixed

• Lyrics still matched a different song. 6.1.0 filtered search results to ±7s of the right length, and Jinjer's Ape is 196s against RED in BLUE's 202s — it passed by one second. The window is now ±7s only when the artist also agrees, and ±2s otherwise: a romanised-artist miss is the same recording and matches almost exactly, whereas a different band's song sharing a title is only ever coincidentally close. A missing duration on either side is now a refusal rather than a pass.

• Every NetEase result would have parsed as empty. lrclib writes [mm:ss.xx]; NetEase writes [mm:ss:xx], with a colon before the centiseconds. The timestamp pattern accepted only the dot, so a good lookup would have come back as an empty list and read as "no lyrics found".

• Romanisation printed every English line twice. The check that drops romaji when it only echoes a Latin line back compared the strings exactly, but pykakasi re-spaces around punctuation — Yeah, yeah becomes Yeah , yeah — so it never matched. Compared on letters and digits now.

Packaging

• python-syncedlyrics added to the installer's AUR packages.

6.1.02026-08-16

The widgets update. Bar widgets you can actually configure, a rebuilt media panel, and lyrics that tell you how to pronounce them.

The through-line is data that was already being collected and never reaching the screen. sea-sysmon.sh had been sampling CPU, RAM, GPU, VRAM, temperatures and power every three seconds since the pill was written — and the pill rendered exactly one of those numbers, so a 6GB card had its VRAM measured on every tick and displayed nowhere. Notifications recorded their action buttons and drew them only on the popup. The Wi-Fi scan parsed each network's security type and threw it away for a padlock glyph.

Nothing moves and nothing is lost. Every new key defaults to the previous behaviour: the System Monitor still shows CPU alone until you add to it, the microphone widget is off, and lyrics romanisation is on only when the panel is open.

Added

• Lyrics pronunciation and translation. Romaji under Japanese lines, Revised Romanisation under Korean, pinyin under Chinese — offline, via pykakasi/pypinyin and a pure-algorithm Hangul pass, computed once per track. Translation is opt-in and shells out to translate-shell. Both are stacked under the original rather than replacing it, because singing along needs both at once. Both are line-aligned with the lyrics or discarded entirely — the panel indexes them with the same lyrIdx, so a result off by one line would confidently show the reading of the wrong lyric.

• The System Monitor pill is configurable. Eight readings — CPU, RAM, GPU and VRAM, each as a percentage or an absolute, plus both temperatures — in any combination, chosen in Settings → Bar. GPU readings remove themselves on a machine with no discrete card rather than rendering a dash.

• Microphone widget. Input level on the bar, click to mute, red while muted. Off by default. Reads @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SOURCE@ through wpctl so it follows the default source changing the way the volume keys do, and re-samples after a toggle instead of assuming.

• The clock dropdown folds. Calendar, Upcoming, Timer and World Clock each collapse from their header and stay that way. It stacked to roughly 720px with no cap, which ran off the bottom of anything shorter than 1080p; fully folded it is about 120px. A running countdown stays visible on the folded Timer header, since that is when you would look.

• Notification actions in the centre. They were recorded on every notification and drawn only on the transient popup, so anything that timed out or arrived during Do Not Disturb landed in history with a Reply button that existed in the data and nowhere on screen. They render dead once the server releases the notification rather than staying pressable.

Changed

• The media panel is rebuilt. Square rounded album art as the anchor instead of an 84px thumbnail; the level meter rides the art's bottom edge instead of taking a 38px band of its own; remaining time rather than total, in tabular mono so it stops re-measuring on every tick; one filled primary control instead of five of equal weight; and the signal chain — out via …, bit-perfect, the DAC model — promoted from two 10px lines under the album name to a strip of its own. It is the most specific thing this panel knows and the one thing no other shell can tell you.

• The Wi-Fi panel shows what it already knew. Signal strength as a number, mono and tabular, next to the bars — the scan sorts on it and the panel re-probes every 8s to keep it moving, yet it only ever reached the screen as one of three icons. Security is named (WPA2, WPA3, OPEN, WEP) instead of a padlock at 60% opacity, with open and WEP networks flagged as warnings. The list also says when it has capped itself at eight.

• Track details read like a readout. Keys as tracked uppercase labels, values in mono — a bitrate, a release year and a sink name are readings, and the panel rendered them in the same face as prose.

Fixed

• Every toggle in the shell detached from reality after one click. IndToggle assigned over its own on property before emitting, which destroyed the caller's binding — so from the first press onward Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Caffeine, Audio and WARP showed what they had been clicked to rather than what was true. A WARP connect that failed, or a radio something else turned off, stayed wrong for the life of the session.

• The DAC widget was missing from the bar widget list — and from five other places. Most damaging: saveAppearance() rebuilds appearance.json from scratch, so every settings save silently deleted wgDac. The pill only survived because reconcileOrder re-added it from the default each boot, which is also why its position never stuck. The same list had wgUpdates and wgNet in it twice, so both showed as duplicate rows and dragging either wrote the duplicate to disk; reconcileOrder now de-duplicates so a damaged config heals.

• Saved bar layouts dropped two widgets. Network Speed and Updates were toggleable in the panel but absent from barToggleKeys, so switching between saved layouts left them wherever they happened to be.

• Lyrics sometimes belonged to a different song. The last search step queries lrclib by title alone — deliberately, since MPRIS and lrclib disagree on how to spell artists — and the parser then took the first result that had any lyrics. "Embers" returns every song ever called Embers. Results are now filtered by duration within ±7s with a fuzzy artist match preferred, and no match beats a confident wrong one.

• Album art was never rounded, in three separate panels. clip: true on a Rectangle clips children to the bounding box and ignores the radius, so no radius value would have worked; the art sat square-cornered inside a rounded frame. Now ClippingRectangle.

• The media transport was not centred. Row lays children out left to right and leaves y at 0, so the 48px play button hung 6px below its 36px neighbours. Hiding unsupported shuffle and loop compounded it — a Row drops invisible children and re-centres on what is left, so a player reporting loop but not shuffle pushed play off-axis. The row is now always five slots, with unsupported controls dimmed and inert rather than absent.

Packaging

• python-pykakasi, pypinyin and translate-shell added to the installer's repo packages. All three are in extra, so the lyrics features need no AUR helper.

6.0.02026-08-15

A dock, and an interface that reads like an instrument.

Two headline changes sit next to each other. sea-shell grows a real dock — pinned and running apps, magnification, per-monitor, on any edge. And every data-bearing surface is rebuilt on one industrial design language: labelled regions divided by hairlines instead of translucent cards nested three deep, tabular mono on every number, and a single accent that marks the active thing and nothing else.

Underneath is the "I am about to disappear for six months" half of the release. Over-the-air updates, a health check, backup & restore and a bar supervisor exist for one reason: so a machine you are no longer actively ricing can be diagnosed, repaired and updated without remembering how any of it works.

Nothing breaks and nothing moves. Every existing key in appearance.json is read as before, and each new one defaults to the old behaviour — the dock is off until you turn it on, and the two new bar widgets are opt-in from Bar Widgets.

Added

Dock · Settings → Dock

• Pinned + running apps in one strip, per-monitor, on any edge (bottom/top/left/right), with macOS-style cursor magnification, running-app dots and hover labels.

• Three visibility modes: always, auto-hide (reveal strip at the edge), and when free — visible until a window would overlap it.

• Left-click launches, or focuses a running window — cycling by focus history when the app has several. Middle-click opens a new instance; right-click pins or unpins. Pins persist to ~/.config/sea-shell/dock.json.

Staying alive, and staying current

• Over-the-air updates · Settings → System. Checks GitHub for a newer sea-shell and updates in place. It only ever fast-forwards: if the repo has uncommitted changes, unpushed commits or a diverged history, it refuses and says which — an updater that can eat your own unpushed work is not one you should ever press.

• Health check · Settings → System. Forty-odd read-only checks — dependencies, fonts, config JSON validity, deployment, compositor, and the supervisor's crash log. That log is the usual difference between fixing the bar and reinstalling it; nothing surfaced it before.

• Backup & restore · Settings → System. One archive of every setting, pin, rule, gesture and keybind (sea-backup.sh). Restoring writes a .pre-restore archive first, so restoring the wrong file is itself undoable.

• Bar supervisor — Quickshell dies with rc=255 when its Wayland connection drops, which a fullscreen client tearing down reliably causes: closing a game took the bar with it and left you barless until SUPER+SHIFT+B. The bar now runs under a supervisor that respawns it, logs every exit, and gives up after 5 failures in a row rather than spinning.

System

• Package updates pill — repo + AUR counts (via checkupdates, so it never touches the live pacman db), the full list with old → new versions in a dropdown, and one click to run the upgrade in a terminal. Opt-in from Bar Widgets.

• Network throughput pill — live up/down rates on the active interface. Opt-in.

• Game mode · SUPER+SHIFT+G. Strips blur, shadows, animations and the video wallpaper, switches to the performance profile and silences notifications — then restores every one to the value it had before, not to a hardcoded default.

• Disks · Settings → Disks. Drives grouped with model, bus and size; partitions with real used/free bars from lsblk; mount, unmount and eject through udisks. Unmounted partitions show no bar rather than an empty one, because their usage genuinely isn't knowable without mounting.

• Screen time · Settings → Screen time. Per-app focus time, paused while the session is idle, with optional daily limits and a daily summary notification. History in usage.json.

• Notification actions — notifications with buttons now render them and invoke them.

Compositor

• Window rules · Settings → Window rules. Float, size, position, centre, opacity, workspace, pin and no-blur per app class or title, written to rules.lua and applied live. Loaded after the shipped rules so yours always wins.

• Touchpad gestures · Settings → Input. Swipe actions by finger count and direction. The valid action/direction sets were probed against Hyprland, not taken from docs, so the UI cannot offer you a combination the compositor will reject.

• Input tab — mouse sensitivity and acceleration profile, natural scroll, touchpad tap, scroll speed and disable-while-typing.

• VRR — off / always / fullscreen / fullscreen-video, per the compositor's own modes.

• Games opt out of the glass — steam_app_* and gamescope windows are forced opaque with no blur, shadow, rounding or animation. An unfocused game at inactive_opacity 0.96 forces a 4-pass blur that samples the animated wallpaper behind it every frame; on a hybrid laptop that blur runs on the same iGPU that is copying the game's frames across.

• Laptop lid actions — suspend · lock · display off · hibernate · shut down · ignore (Settings → Power / Idle & lock), written to keybinds.lua and applied live.

Wallpaper

• Transitions — 14 swww transitions with configurable fps and duration, and a dip-to-black fade drawn by the shell for the SUPER+N cycle (mpvpaper can't transition at all, so the shell covers the swap itself).

• Auto-rotate on a timer — next, previous or random, off by default and re-read from disk each tick, so toggling it needs no restart and leaves no daemon running when off.

• One apply path — the picker, the cycle binds, login restore and the rotator now all route through sea-wallpaper-apply.sh. The swww invocation used to be copy-pasted into two files with the transition hardcoded in both.

Misc

• OCR a region to the clipboard · SUPER+SHIFT+O (needs tesseract).

Changed

• Every surface is rebuilt on the industrial design language. The bar, control center, dashboard, launcher, keybinds, power menu, screenshot tools, recorder and DAC panel now share eleven components (IndTable, IndPanel, IndKpi, IndChip, …) and one token singleton. Data lives in real tables with declared columns rather than in per-surface hand-rolled rows — displays, keybinds, audio devices, VPNs and processes each had grown their own copy of the same header-plus-hairline layout.

• Design tokens are a singleton. shell.qml, settings.qml and Dashboard.qml each used to declare their own theme object and separately re-parse appearance.json; the three had already drifted. Tok.qml reads it once. The accent stays user-configurable and matugen-driven, and the neutral ramp is derived from its hue so the greys read as chosen.

• The window glow follows matugen. matugen.lua was dofile'd before the decoration block, so the shadow colour it wrote was immediately overwritten by the hardcoded sea-cyan below it — the glow never followed the wallpaper. It now loads after everything it may override.

• SUPER+SHIFT+B restarts through the supervisor instead of pkill-ing the bar, so a manual restart is no longer indistinguishable from a crash.

Fixed

• Settings could silently reset every appearance setting. A read that caught appearance.json mid-write (a reinstall, or matugen rewriting it) failed to parse, left the in-memory settings at their declared defaults, and still marked the config loaded — so the next save wrote those defaults over your real file. The dock switching itself off was the visible symptom; the actual blast radius was the whole file. An empty read (no config yet) is now distinguished from an unparseable one (retry), and saving is blocked until a clean parse.

• install.sh reported "bar restarted" when it hadn't. hyprctl dispatch exec is a Lua syntax error under the 0.55+ parser, and the error went to /dev/null. It now dispatches correctly and confirms the process actually survived rather than trusting the exit code.

• The updates pill was dead on click. Every dropdown must be listed in the bar's grab set — one left out isn't merely unregistered, it counts as outside the grab, so it opened and was dismissed in the same frame.

• The dock ignored every click. Its input region pointed at an item inside the UI-scale wrapper, whose coordinates are pre-scale and one level down, while the region is interpreted in window space — so the dock rendered perfectly and accepted input somewhere else entirely.

• The dock left its icons stuck at full magnification. Clicking an icon focuses a window — often on another workspace — and the burst of Hyprland events that follows rebuilds the dock's item list, which makes the Repeater destroy the delegate the pointer was inside. A destroyed MouseArea never emits onExited, so the hover state was never cleared and the icons sat zoomed with the pointer nowhere near them. The card's own handler was clearing the hover key but not the hover index — which is why the label correctly vanished while the magnification it should have vanished with did not.

• Right-clicking a dock icon looked like it did nothing. It did toggle the pin, and it did write dock.json — but for an app that was already running, nothing on screen changed, so the binding read as dead. The hover label now states the pin, and names the binding when there isn't one.

• Re-installing reverted the shell prompt to the default cyan. ~/.config/starship.toml is generated, not installed: the theme pipeline substitutes the wallpaper palette into starship-default.toml to produce it. install.sh was writing the shipped source straight over that output, so the prompt dropped back to #63c7dd while every other surface stayed on the wallpaper's accent. The shipped copy now updates the template, and the live prompt is seeded only when there isn't one.

• Re-installing also discarded lock and idle settings. hyprlock.conf and hypridle.conf are edited in place by the control center, and copy_file suppresses its backup for any file containing "sea-shell" — which both of them do — so they were overwritten with nothing kept. A file the shell or the user writes is no longer overwritten by an install at all.

• The scratchpad put a -98 chip in the bar. Hyprland numbers special workspaces from -98 down, and the workspace strip drew every workspace it was handed — so SUPER + grave added a chip whose label did not fit its own 24px circle, and whose click dispatched focus({ workspace = -98 }), which is not how a special workspace is reached. A special workspace is an overlay on the one you are already on, not a place in a list of places to go; its windows being on screen is what tells you it is open.

• The launcher calculator rejected exponents. =2^10 returned nothing and the panel sat there saying "keep typing". The evaluator has always rewritten ^ to **, but the character whitelist that guards it was missing ^, so the expression never reached the evaluator at all.

• The settings sidebar overflowed past the last tab once the new tabs were added; it now scrolls.

5.0.02026-08-02

sea-shell's Hyprland config is now Lua. Since Hyprland 0.55, hyprlang (.conf) is deprecated and will be removed around 0.57 — so the compositor config is fully migrated to the new Lua format, validated against Hyprland's own --verify-config.

Breaking: requires Hyprland 0.55+, and your top-level config must be ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.lua. See hypr/README-lua.md to migrate an existing hyprland.conf (flip with a logout/login — not hyprctl reload).

Changed

• sea.conf → sea.lua, keybinds.conf → keybinds.lua. Every binding keeps its description (the SUPER+K cheat-sheet reads hyprctl binds, so it's format-agnostic), and the look — general/decoration/blur/shadow, the two bezier curves + six animations, and the layer rules that frost the bar/dropdowns — is reproduced exactly in hl.config / hl.curve / hl.animation / hl.layer_rule / hl.window_rule form.

• matugen now emits matugen.lua alongside its live hyprctl apply, so the wallpaper accent persists and re-applies on login via sea.lua's dofile (no runtime re-theming needed). A plain colour becomes a string; the gradient becomes { colors = {…}, angle = N }.

• Settings tooling writes Lua. Keybind add/rebind and the lid-action setting edit keybinds.lua (falling back to keybinds.conf when present), producing valid hl.bind lines — verified against Hyprland.

• install.sh is Lua-only. It deploys sea.lua / keybinds.lua, wires a marker-wrapped dofile block into hyprland.lua, purges any legacy sea.conf / keybinds.conf / matugen.conf from a prior install, and strips the old hyprlang block from hyprland.conf.

Kept on hyprlang (unchanged)

• hyprlock.conf and hypridle.conf — separate daemons that keep hyprlang per upstream; they are not the Hyprland compositor config and are unaffected by 0.57.

4.0.02026-07-27

A release in two halves: the audio and window-management surfaces grew real depth, and four genuinely new tools landed — display profiles, timers & pomodoro, a world clock, and a screen magnifier.

Added

• Display profiles (Settings → Display → layout profiles). Save the whole monitor arrangement — resolution, position, scale, transform, enabled-state — and restore it in one tap when you dock or unplug:

  • monitors are matched by their description (make/model/serial) first and connector name second, so a profile still applies when an external screen returns on another port

  • a saved layout whose monitor set matches what's connected right now is flagged with a green check; apply and delete are inline

  • backed by sea-display.py (--current · --save · --apply · --delete · --list · --match), storing to ~/.config/sea-shell/display-profiles.json

• Timers & Pomodoro, folded into the clock dropdown — no new bar widget to manage:

  • quick countdowns (1 / 5 / 10 / 15 / 25 min) plus a full pomodoro cycle with pause · skip · stop and a live progress bar

  • focus auto-silences notifications (flips DND on during focus, back off on breaks, restoring whatever DND state you started with), and every phase change fires a notification + completion chime

  • the clock pill itself becomes the countdown while a timer runs (🔥 focus / ☕ break / ⏱ timer), so it's visible with the dropdown closed

  • focus / break lengths and the DND behaviour persist to ~/.config/sea-shell/timers.json

• World clock, also in the clock dropdown: add cities from a quick-pick list (New York, London, Tokyo, Sydney, UTC, …), each showing local time + day, refreshed every minute; chosen zones persist alongside the timer settings.

• Screen magnifier (Hyprland cursor:zoom_factor): SUPER + / SUPER - step the zoom (hold to repeat), SUPER 0 resets. The level flashes in the shared volume/brightness OSD as a 1.5× readout. Driven by a new zoom IPC target (inc · dec · reset · toggle).

Changed

• Audio got a proper mixer and routing layer (bar volume dropdown + Settings → Audio), backed by a new sea-audio.py:

  • per-app volume sliders and per-app output routing — send any stream to any sink from the dropdown, no pavucontrol needed

  • device format readout — each sink shows its negotiated rate + bit depth (e.g. 48k · 24-bit) and, when idle, the rate it will run at, with an "up to" hint for higher capabilities

  • Bluetooth codec switching — pick SBC / SBC-XQ / AAC / aptX / LDAC on a connected device (via the A2DP card profile), addressed by the sink's stable node name so the choice survives the sink being recreated on switch

• Alt-Tab window switcher now shows live thumbnails of every window (most-recently- used order), on the focused monitor only, with an app-icon fallback and click-to-focus — replacing the old icon-only strip.

• Exposé / Mission Control (SUPER W) now renders live thumbnails of each window in its workspace instead of a text list; click a tile to jump to it.

Fixed

• Window-thumbnail overlays no longer leak a stray preview into a screen corner — the ScreencopyView texture node is contained to its card via an FBO layer.

• The switcher no longer mirrors onto every monitor (which read as a duplicate switcher "behind" the real one); it renders only on the focused output.

• Caffeine mode is now sticky. The desired state persists to ~/.config/sea-shell/caffeine, is re-applied at startup, and is enforced on every poll — so a login or hyprctl reload can no longer silently drop you back to idle-sleep while caffeine is on. No more re-toggling it every session.

3.3.02026-07-20

Added

• Native KDE Connect integration. Your phone lives in the bar — no external app, no KDE session pieces, nothing to run alongside:

  • a status pill (wgKdeconnect) showing the device icon and its battery percent, tinted the way the laptop battery is (green charging, red under 20%)

  • a dropdown in the same frosted style as wi-fi and bluetooth: battery bar and charging state, cell signal strength + network type, and one tap for ring · ping · send file · send clipboard · browse files (sftp) · messages — each greyed out when that device hasn't loaded the matching plugin

  • pairing in place: accept or reject against the verification key, or request a pair, plus a device switcher once more than one device is known

  • a KDE Connect tab in the control center with the same per-device actions, for when you want the whole list at once

  Everything goes through sea-kdeconnect.py, which talks to kdeconnectd over D-Bus. --watch is a resident process that re-reads the daemon only when D-Bus says something changed (battery, reachability, pairing), so the bar is live without polling anything; properties come back as JSON from busctl --json, one call per interface rather than one process per property, and the script starts kdeconnectd if it isn't on the bus. It also reports which plugins each device has actually loaded, which is what greys out the actions a given device can't do. kdeconnect and zenity — the file picker behind "send file", optional — were added to install.sh.

Fixed

• Display tab monitor refresh: Modified the Display settings tab to automatically re-read connected monitors via hyprctl on open, making hotplugged screens appear instantly.

• NVIDIA HDMI audio auto-routing: Added automatic detection and activation of the NVIDIA HDMI audio controller profile (output:hdmi-stereo) and set it as the default output sink upon monitor connection.

• All of the above was spotted by me myself funny enough as I was watching the WC Final (Congrats to Spain btw) when I needed to plug in my monitor into my TV

3.2.12026-07-16

Fixed

• The EQ and recorder panels ignored matugen. Change your wallpaper and the whole shell recoloured — except those two, which kept whatever accent the bar happened to start with. Two separate causes, both from being the newest panels and never having been wired up the way the others are:

  • They read appearance.json once, at bar startup, and never again — while matugen rewrites accent on every wallpaper change. Every other panel re-reads on open (settings.qml has done apReadProc.running = true in showTab() all along); these two had no id on the Process at all, so nothing could re-run it. Only restarting the bar picked up a new colour.

  • Their surfaces were hardcoded to #0d1420 / #e8eef5 and only the accent was tinted, so even after a restart they sat at a fixed navy while the rest of the shell followed the accent hue at low saturation. With a near-white matugen accent (#cfcfd5) in light mode, that read as a plain white box.

  Both now match settings.qml: hue-derived surfaces, re-read on open(). Verified by changing the accent with the bar left running — the panels open in the new colour instead of the startup one.

3.2.02026-07-16

A recorder and an equaliser release. Screen recording stops being a blind region drag: pick what to capture and which audio — including mic and system together, which wf-recorder can't do alone — and it no longer interrupts anything. The equaliser stops needing a DAC: with no Moondrop plugged in the same panel runs the filters in PipeWire instead, on your speakers or anything else. And it gains Moondrop Hub's community library — ~59,700 user-made curves, searchable, previewed before you apply.

Added

• The EQ panel no longer needs a DAC. With a supported Moondrop device the filters run on its DSP as before; without one, the same panel drives a software EQ through a PipeWire filter-chain — laptop speakers, another brand's DAC, bluetooth. It picks automatically, and a DAC | software toggle forces software even with a DAC plugged in (software has no Q2.30 limit, so the shelf gains the DAC must refuse work there). Community presets, AutoEQ import, the graph and the preset row all work either way. DAC-only controls (device slot, global offset) hide themselves in software rather than sitting there doing nothing.

• sea-eq.py — the software EQ is now sea-shell's own script, standalone: pipewire only, no Moondrop code, no hidapi import, usable from a terminal without this shell (sea-eq.py --apply --from-rew ParametricEQ.txt). It previously lived in moondrop_control.py, which is vendored from hub_moon and had no business knowing about pipewire — that file is now purely a USB-HID DAC controller. Its response maths is an independent standard-RBJ implementation (the DAC's uses Moondrop's swapped coefficient layout, which would be wrong here); checked against the old one across 12 real community presets, agreeing to within 0.42 dB — the difference 48 kHz vs 96 kHz explains.

• Software EQ setup is managed, and doesn't interrupt anything — the first apply asks, then writes one config to filter-chain.conf.d and starts filter-chain.service. That's a separate pipewire instance, so unlike the usual pipewire.conf.d recipe the main daemon is never restarted and no stream on the machine is dropped. Verified: main pipewire's pid is unchanged across install, apply, re-apply and remove. Editing is apply-based: pipewire 1.6 still advertises per-band control params but silently ignores writes to them (the graph moved under audioconvert.filter-graph), so a change re-renders and reloads — ~1s, on that sink alone. The panel says so.

• Community presets in the DAC panel — a community button opens a browser over the ~59,700-curve public library behind Moondrop Hub, searchable by name, author or description (the search runs over the whole library, not just the page you can see), sorted by downloads. Applying one fills every band through the same path the built-in presets use. You get your device family's whole pool — a DAWN PRO2 sees ~6,900 curves, not just its own 1,270 — because the server pools by shared config group. Reads need no account, and the panel never publishes or likes. Browsing opens no hidraw handle, so it can't collide with a band write in flight.

• Preview before you apply — clicking a preset draws its response; only the apply button touches the DAC. Titles like "三角洲" tell you nothing about what happens at 3 kHz, and auditioning 59,700 strangers' curves one write at a time is not a plan. The preview also reports whether that curve would clip at your current pre-gain, which a published preset can't tell you — they carry bands and nothing else.

• Back to top in the preset list, once you're scrolled past the first rows.

• Official-style response readout — the graph gets a toggle (top-right) between the editor and the readout hub.moondroplab.tech draws: normalised so the flat reference sits at 60 dB, one curve, pre-gain paid for. Verified against the official app's own chart for the same preset — same dip at 200 Hz, same peak at 5.5 kHz, same rolloff. The editor view now also shows the Flat reference and a dashed output curve with pre-gain applied, so a +6 dB boost no longer looks free.

• Screen recorder, rebuilt (SUPER+R) — a chooser instead of an instant region drag: pick what to capture (region · focused screen · a named output) and which audio (none · microphone · system · mic + system together), plus framerate, container (mp4/mkv/webm) and CPU/GPU (VAAPI) encoding. Choices persist to ~/.config/sea-shell/recorder.json and are passed as flags too, so a bare sea-record.sh start in a terminal reproduces exactly what the panel last did. SUPER+R stops a running recording rather than opening the chooser.

• Mic + system audio at once — wf-recorder takes exactly one --audio device, so the shell builds the mix itself (null sink + two loopbacks, recorded via its monitor). Torn down on stop, and swept on the next start and on the bar's status tick, so a killed recording can't strand a loopback holding the microphone open. The default sink is saved and restored across the mix, so loading it can't silently re-point playback.

• Bit-perfect warning — a player holding the DAC directly over ALSA bypasses pipewire, which makes the monitor system audio records from real, readable and silent. The chooser detects the exclusive hold and says so before you record.

• Countdown (off/3s/5s) drawn by the shell, click-through so it can't steal the pointer from whatever you're about to record, and gone before the first frame.

• Recorder pill — pulsing red dot + timer. Left-click stops and keeps (path to the clipboard, file size in the notification); right-click discards, arming first and showing discard? so a stray click can't delete a take.

• Device names in the chooser resolve the way a person would name them: a card with one output is the device ("DAWN PRO2"), a card with several is named by port ("Speaker", "HDMI / DisplayPort 2 Output") — instead of four chips all reading "Alder Lake PCH-P…".

Fixed

• The recorder could SIGTERM an unrelated process. Liveness was kill -0 <pid>, which after the recorder exits is a question about whoever the kernel handed that pid to next. Stopping a dead recording would signal that stranger, then SIGKILL it five seconds later; status would also report a phantom recording forever. It now verifies the pid is still wf-recorder via /proc/<pid>/comm.

• sea-record.sh status exited non-zero when idle, breaking && chains.

• A recording that fails to start (bad codec, missing render node, busy device) now says why, instead of silently never showing the pill.

• wf-recorder and jq were missing from the installer's package list, so screen recording was quietly unavailable on a fresh install.

3.1.02026-07-15

A DAC release. The Moondrop equaliser lands in full — one-tap presets, an in-shell import for AutoEQ files, a revert that actually works, and a software EQ escape hatch so the same curves run on hardware this panel can't drive. Plus clipboard thumbnails and real brand logos on the System page.

Added

• Moondrop DAC equaliser — a native control panel (SUPER+SHIFT+E) for Moondrop USB DACs / DSP cables (DAWN PRO2, FreeDSP, Rays, MOONRIVER 3, …). Full 8-band parametric EQ with a live, region-labelled frequency-response graph (SUB → AIR zones so you can see what each part tunes) — drag any band point to set frequency/gain, scroll to change Q — an all-bands column editor (type · gain · freq · Q per band), pre-gain, global offset, and save-to-flash. Edits apply to the DSP in real time and persist only when you save. Built on a reverse-engineered USB-HID protocol; the installer adds python-hidapi and a udev rule so it works without root. No-ops gracefully with no DAC connected.

• One-tap presets — eight starting curves (Flat, Bass, V-shape, Vocals, Warm, Air, Podcast, Loudness) fill every band and set a matching pre-gain, ready to tweak. Each preset is checked against the firmware's coefficient range, so none of them get silently altered on the way to the DAC.

• Import and export, with a file browser built into the panel — no external dialog: the panel is a layer-shell overlay holding exclusive keyboard focus, so a zenity/portal window would open underneath it and never take focus. Browse straight from the panel instead (Home / Downloads / Documents shortcuts, folder navigation, filtered listing). Import an AutoEQ / REW ParametricEQ.txt or a saved .json — applied live, so you can audition a measured preset for your headphones before committing it to flash. Export either a full JSON backup or a ready-to-use PipeWire software-EQ config.

• Revert — undo unsaved edits back to the DAC's last saved state. Reloading can't do this: edits go to the DSP live, so re-reading only ever returns what you just wrote, never what flash still holds. The panel keeps its own snapshot.

• Universal (software) EQ — works on any output device — the bands above run on the DAC's own chip, so they only exist on supported Moondrop hardware. The same curves can now be rendered as a PipeWire filter-chain instead, which applies to anything: another brand's DAC, laptop speakers, Bluetooth. Needs no Moondrop device at all — feed it an AutoEQ file directly:

  `` moondrop_control.py --to-pipewire eq.conf --from-rew ParametricEQ.txt cp eq.conf ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/ systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse ``

  Then select the “Universal EQ” sink. Software biquads are floating point, so the handful of shelf gains the DAC's fixed-point DSP has to refuse work fine here.

• Built-in “how to tune” guide — for anyone who's never touched an EQ: four rules, what each frequency region does (colour-matched to the graph), and quick recipes. Every filter shape and recipe is illustrated with a real response curve drawn from the same maths as the main graph, so the pictures can't drift from what the filters actually do.

• Image thumbnails in the clipboard picker — copied images now show a live preview in the ; clipboard history (launcher) instead of a generic icon. Each image entry is decoded from cliphist to a small cached thumbnail (/tmp/sea-clip-thumbs, keyed by id), rendered rounded with an accent border; text entries are unchanged. Uses the existing imagemagick dependency.

Changed

• Real brand logos on the System page — the Settings → System overview now shows proper logos instead of generic glyphs: the distro (CachyOS, Arch, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Fedora, NixOS, … — ~30 mapped, with a Tux fallback for the rest), the kernel (Tux), the compositor (Hyprland), and the session (Wayland / Xorg). They recolour with the theme accent like every other icon. CachyOS ships no icon-font glyph, so its mark is drawn natively (CachyLogo.qml). Adds a dependency on ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols (the installer now pulls it in and warns if it's missing).

Fixed

• Notification when multiple appears and close will have a rectangle shadow like box coming out when closing (hard to describe forgive me)

3.0.02026-07-14

The 3.0 release makes the shell comfortable on any display and hands you far more control over it — display scaling, a Control Center, drag-to-reorder widgets, and an auto-hiding bar — on top of a ground-up rework of the Settings window and the screenshot editor, and a batch of smaller quality-of-life wins. Some were planned for 2.1 but then somehow with tons of additions and ideas I decided to push it as 3.0

Added

• Launcher emoji picker — type . then a name (.fire, .heart, .rocket) to search a curated emoji set; ⏎ copies the glyph to the clipboard.

• More launcher conversions — the = … to … / auto-conversion now covers volume (ml/l/cup/gal…), data (kb/mb/gb/gib…), speed (kmh/mph/knots), time (min/hr/day…), stone/tonne, nautical miles, and more currencies — on top of the existing length / weight / temperature / currency support.

• Night light — warms the screen colour in the evening via hyprsunset. Toggle it from the Control Center, or Settings → Display → night light: set the warmth (2500–6000 K) and optionally have it follow dark mode so the screen warms whenever the shell goes dark. (hyprsunset ships with the installer.)

• Bluetooth battery on the bar — the Bluetooth pill now shows a connected device's battery percentage next to its name (already shown in the dropdown).

• Persistent notification history — the notification centre now survives a restart: history is saved to ~/.config/sea-shell/notif-history.json (last 40) and restored on launch, apostrophes / emoji / any text intact.

• Per-app do-not-disturb — mute a noisy app straight from the notification centre (the bell icon on any notification, or the "muted apps" chips). Muted apps stop popping up but are still recorded in history; critical alerts always break through. Persisted to ~/.config/sea-shell/notif-mutes.json.

• Night light bar widget — an optional one-tap night-light pill for the bar (off by default; enable it in Settings → Bar widgets). Glows warm while active; click to toggle the warm screen on/off.

• Control Center — a new bar pill (the tune icon) opens a quick-settings panel: one-tap toggles for dark mode, caffeine, do-not-disturb, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and night light, a power-profile switcher (saver / balanced / performance), and a shortcut to full settings. Toggle it on/off and reorder it like any widget.

• Auto-hide bar — Settings → Appearance → bar shape: tuck the bar away and reveal it by pushing the cursor to the docked edge. Optional "hide only when a window is fullscreen" mode for video/games. Off by default.

• Reorderable bar widgets — Settings → Bar widgets now lets you drag the ⠿ handle on each widget to change the order it appears in on the bar (persisted to appearance.json as widgetOrder, and saved with appearance profiles). The Media Player stays centred; the screen recorder can be positioned too.

• Reorderable left cluster — the left side (logo · workspaces · window-title) is now drag-reorderable too, under Settings → Bar widgets → left side (persisted as leftOrder).

• Per-monitor bar rules — Settings → Display → monitor: turn the bar off on a specific output, or give that monitor its own UI-scale override (independent of the global scale). Ideal for a laptop-plus-TV setup — keep the laptop bar at 1× while the TV bar scales up, or hide the bar on one screen entirely. Stored per output name in appearance.json as monitors.

• Bar layout presets — Settings → Bar widgets → layout presets: save the current widget order, left-side order and every on/off toggle as a named preset and restore it in one click (stored in ~/.config/sea-shell/bar-layouts.json).

• Rebuilt screenshot editor — annotate a capture with brush, arrow, rectangle and text, crop it, or pull text out of it with OCR, then copy or save. The whole editing surface now works in the capture's native pixels, so crop, OCR and export all line up and the saved / copied image comes out at full resolution. New: a rectangle tool, undo (⌃z), selectable stroke sizes, hover tooltips, and keyboard shortcuts (b/a/r/t/c tools · ⌃z undo · x clear · ⌃c copy · ⌃s save · esc cancel).

• Display scaling for big / far screens — the whole shell now scales up on high-resolution displays so it stays legible when projected to a 4K TV or a projector, instead of rendering tiny at native pixels. Every surface is affected: the bar, dropdowns, launcher, dashboard, Exposé, the power / wallpaper / screenshot overlays, notifications, the OSD, and the settings window.

  • Auto (default) — each monitor is sized from its own height, so a 4K TV scales up (~2×) while a 1080p / 1440p laptop is left untouched at 1×. In a mixed setup the laptop bar stays normal while the TV bar grows.

  • Manual override — Settings → Display → display scale: turn off "auto scale" and drag the UI-scale slider (0.75×–2.5×). Persisted to ~/.config/sea-shell/appearance.json as "scale" (0 = auto) and shared by every surface; also saved/restored with appearance profiles.

Changed

• Settings window redesigned — every tab is rebuilt on a shared control kit (toggle cards, aligned slider rows, chips, section headers), so labels, sliders and switches line up on one rail across the whole window instead of drifting per tab. Easier to scan and navigate; same settings, cleaner surface.

• Caffeine bar pill is now always a mug icon — muted when idle, lit warm yellow while it's keeping the screen awake (was swapping to a moon glyph).

• Simpler keybinds editor — Settings → Keybinds is now a clean name-and-shortcut list; click any bind (or the ＋ button) to open a focused popup that shows the details and lets you pick modifiers and press the new key, instead of the old inline rebind bar and add-form. Add and edit share one dialog.

Fixed

• Screenshot editor buttons did nothing. OCR, copy and save were called through a stale object reference (root.<id> instead of the id), so every click silently threw and no capture ever reached the clipboard.

• Copied / saved screenshots were blank. The editor exported only the annotation overlay, not the screenshot underneath it — the image now composites correctly and lands on the clipboard as a real image/png.

• Bar-widgets toggle alignment — the on/off switches now line up on the right edge instead of stair-stepping (a long description no longer pushes the toggle out).

• Night light could get stuck on. Dragging the warmth slider while night light was on clobbered the process's on/off binding, so turning it back off left the screen permanently warm. Temperature changes now update the running hyprsunset live over its IPC (smoother, no flash) and the on/off state always tracks correctly.

• Night light did nothing if hyprsunset was installed after the shell started. The one-time startup probe would cache "not available" forever; the shell now re-checks whenever night light is switched on, so it works without a restart.

• Control Center rendering — the Night light tile no longer shows a stray "OFF" (invalid icon glyph), and the "Do not disturb" tile no longer truncates.

• Display-settings alignment — the warmth / UI-scale / per-monitor-scale slider rows now line up with the setting cards above them instead of sitting flush against the panel edge.

2.0.02026-07-13

The 2.0 release turns the bar into a full desktop shell: a Mission Control overlay, a dashboard, screen recording, and a much smarter now-playing panel with synced lyrics and track details.

Added

• Mission Control / Exposé (SUPER+W) — a full-screen overlay of every workspace and the windows inside it. Click a window card to jump to it and focus it; click the close icon on a card to quit that window.

• Dashboard overlay (SUPER+D) — a frosted full-screen HUD with a live resource monitor (CPU/RAM sparklines, disk, load average), quick-command tiles (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, caffeine, lock, mute, wallpaper), and a persistent sticky-notes / todo list.

• Screen recording (SUPER+R) — region screen capture via wf-recorder + slurp, toggled from the keybind or the bar, saving to ~/Videos/Recordings.

• Now-playing "track details" sidecar — a panel that opens beside the media dropdown (opposite the lyrics panel) showing large album art, album, source player, bit-perfect quality readout, and live length / elapsed / remaining.

• Time-synced lyrics in the media dropdown — fetched from lrclib.net (free, keyless), highlighted line-by-line and click-to-seek, with a plain-text fallback when no synced version exists.

• Alt-tab window switcher — hold ALT, press Tab to cycle a visual switcher of every open window; release to focus the pick.

• Universal launcher modes (SUPER+Space / CTRL+Space): > run a shell command, = calculator, ~ file search, ; clipboard history.

Changed

• Media pill icon is now a clear music-note glyph instead of the raw play/pause bars, which read as two stray blocks at bar size. Play state is still shown by the dropdown; right-click the pill still toggles playback.

• Lyrics fetching is faster. The exact-match lookup now short-circuits — the common case is a single request instead of two sequential ones — and falls back through artist+title search and finally title-only search, which recovers lyrics when the player reports a romanized artist but lrclib indexes the original (e.g. "Shihoko Hirata" vs "平田志穂子"). Requests use --compressed.

• Lyrics sync is tighter. Playback position is polled every 150 ms (was 400 ms) and interpolated between reports, so the highlighted line tracks the vocal instead of stepping, with a reduced anticipation lead.

• The lyrics button now forces a fresh retry when a previous attempt found nothing, so a track is no longer stuck on "no lyrics found."

• Dashboard and Exposé overlays are now near-opaque (~0.94–0.96) with more solid cards, so their content stays readable over open application windows instead of washing out.

• Version bumped to 2.0 across VERSION and the settings / About panel.

Fixed

• Mission Control and the Dashboard "Caffeine" tile did nothing. Their keybinds/buttons call toggleExpose / toggleIdle over IPC, but those functions were never registered on the shell IPC handler, so the calls silently failed. Both are now exposed and working.

• Lyrics broke when switching audio source. A slow fetch for the previous source could finish after the new one and overwrite it (a lost-update race). Each fetch now stamps its reply with the track it was issued for, and any reply that no longer matches the current track is discarded — so switching sources always lands on the right lyrics.

• Removed the bar-pill mini-visualizer, which rendered as flat 1 px "underscores" for bit-perfect players (SONE) that bypass PipeWire, leaving cava with only silence to draw. The full visualizer inside the dropdown is unaffected.

• Track-details panel no longer clips its last row — it grows to fit its content rather than being fixed to the media card's height.

1.3.0earlier

• Reworked bar padding and added more bar customization options.

• Major overhaul of the matugen colour-generation pipeline.

1.xearlier

• Light/dark mode with scheduling, improved calendar, and dropdown opacity.

• Video wallpapers with automatic pause under fullscreen windows.

• Caffeine toggle, improved locking, screenshot tool, and multi-monitor fixes.

• Network/Wi-Fi handling and icon fixes.

[2.0.0]: https://github.com/MiyukiVigil/sea-shell/releases/tag/v2.0.0 [1.3.0]: https://github.com/MiyukiVigil/sea-shell/releases/tag/v1.3