Roadmap
Sixteen releases in five weeks, from the first one to the next one, in order. There is no date on the part that has not happened yet, on purpose — a roadmap with dates on it is a promise, and this is a statement of intent. For what actually changed in each release, and why, read the changelog.
Earlierbefore July
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The beginning 1.x
Light and dark with a schedule, video wallpapers that pause under a fullscreen window, a screenshot tool, caffeine, locking, and multi-monitor fixes.
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Bar customisation 1.3.0
Bar padding reworked with real options behind it, and a major overhaul of the matugen colour pipeline everything else is themed from.
July 2026eight releases
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13 JulFrom bar to shell 2.0.0
Mission Control arrives and the bar stops being a bar. This is the release where it becomes a full desktop shell.
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14 JulAny display 3.0.0
Comfortable on any monitor, whatever its size or scale, and far more of the shell put under your control.
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15 JulThe DAC 3.1.0
The Moondrop equaliser lands in full — one-tap presets and an in-shell curve editor.
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16 JulRecording 3.2.0
Screen recording stops being a blind region select, and the equaliser grows the rest of its range.
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16 JulTwo things that never recoloured 3.2.1
Everything re-themed with the accent except two surfaces, which kept whatever colour the bar happened to start with.
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20 JulNothing to run alongside 3.3.0
The last KDE session pieces replaced, so the shell no longer needs anything else running next to it.
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27 JulAudio and windows 4.0.0
A release in two halves — the audio and window-management surfaces both grew real depth.
August 2026six releases
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2 AugLua 5.0.0
Hyprland 0.55 deprecated hyprlang, so the shell's entire Hyprland configuration became Lua — and the settings you write in the control center became real Lua with it.
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15 AugA dock, and an instrument 6.0.0
A dock, and an interface rebuilt to read like an instrument rather than a set of panels.
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16 AugThe widgets update 6.1.0
Bar widgets you can actually configure, and a rebuilt media panel.
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16 AugLyrics 6.1.1
A second lyrics source, and the matching between them fixed — four days of lyrics work in one afternoon.
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19 AugThe wallpaper update 6.2.0
The picker learned to search, the folder stopped being a constant, “previous” started meaning previous, and the DAC panel left for Hub Moon.
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21 AugThe bar update 6.4.0 Now
The release before the desktop.
- Per-widget appearance — colour, whether a pill shows an icon, a value or both, and whether it has a filled ground, an outline or none at all.
- Overflow — the right cluster pushes widgets out of the row rather than sliding them under the media pill, and a ⋯ mark carries the count.
- A visible scratchpad — how many windows are being held out of sight, in the bar and as a card in Mission Control.
- Light and dark, three ways — decided by you, by the clock, or by the mean luminance of your wallpaper.
- Link attention — click a link and the dock icon of whatever opened it pulses; the shell can follow you there.
- A picker that opens in 216ms — down from 1178, because motion became opt-in and nothing loads a video decoder until you ask for it.
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21 AugThe desktop update 6.4.0 Now
Where the shell is today. The largest part of your screen stopped being a wallpaper and nothing else.
- Desktop widgets and shortcuts — a clock, weather, now playing and a system read-out, plus launchers, on the desktop itself.
SUPER+SHIFT+Aarranges them. - Wallpaper object awareness — the hard one, and it works. Widgets are placed around what is in the picture rather than on top of it; change the wallpaper and the desktop follows it.
- The global menu — the focused window's own menu bar, in the bar. Qt, GTK, KDE and LibreOffice. The usual plumbing for it cannot work on Wayland; accessibility can.
- Read-outs, not cards — a tracked label, a hairline, a figure, built from the same parts as the bar. On the clock, that hairline's accent segment is the minute.
- Desktop widgets and shortcuts — a clock, weather, now playing and a system read-out, plus launchers, on the desktop itself.
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Not datedWhat comes after Next
Nothing is scheduled. sea-shell is one person's shell and that person is going into a final year, so 6.4 is a good place for it to sit. Fixes will happen; features will wait.
- One arrangement per monitor — today all screens share one. Correct on a single display, wrong on two, and the first thing to fix.
- More widgets — four is a beginning, not a widget system.
Widgets that know what is behind them
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.
This shipped in 6.4. The wallpaper is measured, widgets are placed in its calm parts, dragging shows the busy areas as keep-clear shading, and a widget dropped on the subject moves aside unless you hold shift. A moving wallpaper is read as a picture — the still the picker already extracts — so no video is decoded for it.
It 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 a frame and a detail map reads it as empty. Adding skin-tone detection made it worse. What fixed it was morphology: a smooth face is a hole inside a busy object, not open space.
It is right on eleven of twelve wallpapers in a real library. The twelfth is a solid black silhouette on a white page, which has neither detail nor colour to measure. So it advises and never decides: anything it chooses is one drag away from being overruled, and holding shift while you drop pins a widget where it will never be moved again.
Not planned
Saying no is most of what keeps a project this size finishable by one person.
- Other compositors — the shell writes real Hyprland configuration and reads Hyprland's own event stream. Supporting a second one would mean giving that up.
- X11 — no.
- A plugin API — the whole thing is QML you already have on disk under an MIT licence. Fork it, or lift a widget out of it.
- Telemetry — nothing here reports anything anywhere.
Ideas and complaints both go in issues. Something you want that is not on this page is worth asking for — several things that shipped in 6.3 were asked for the week before.