A notch that earns its place

The tour

What it is

Changelog · latest

Every state

Collapsed

Cover, title, pixel clock, battery and the mic/camera privacy dots. The spectrum ribbon rides the top edge while something plays.

Media

Cover, scrubbing, transport and a spectrum mirrored around the centre so the low bands meet in the middle. Fed by cava.

Lyrics

Time-synced lines in place of the spectrum, the sung one lit and the neighbours dimmed. The block rises by a line on each change, so it reads as a list scrolling rather than three labels blinking.

Clock

A 5×7 bitmap font drawn to a canvas over a dormant LED grid. Digits roll vertically, one pixel row at a time.

Call

An incoming call takes the whole surface, radar rings and all, then folds down to a bar with a running timer once the audio actually connects. Answer and decline invoke the app's own D-Bus actions.

Notification

Pushed in over IPC. Uses the sender's own icon, or falls back to a freedesktop icon-name lookup.

Reply

Senders that attach an inline-reply action get a field and a send button. Typing pauses the dismissal countdown, so a half-written reply is never swallowed mid-sentence.

Privacy

Raised the moment the microphone or camera starts or stops. Polled at a steady rate even while collapsed.

Time

A timer, a stopwatch with laps, a focus cycle and an alarm as one instrument that retunes, rather than four widgets splitting the width. The readout is drawn in the same 5×7 matrix as the clock, and progress is a strip of those same square cells. The rail below keeps the three modes that are not on stage reporting their live values.

Time’s up

Finishing is an event: the island changes shape into a card that pulses until it is answered. Esc, Space, Return, a click anywhere on it, or its button — but not the pointer that happened to be resting where it appeared, and not the island collapsing. A chime plays alongside it, and under a fullscreen window, where the island cannot draw at all, it falls back to the notification daemon and still sounds.

Still counting

A running tool keeps a capsule on the collapsed pill — mode icon, live value in the pixel matrix, a drain line along its edge and a sweep of light travelling across it. Inside the last minute the capsule turns amber and the sweep more than doubles its pace, so the pill escalates on its own without ever growing or moving.

What is in it

MPRIS media

Cover art, scrubbing, shuffle and repeat, previous/play/next. Transport buttons apply optimistically, so the panel reacts on click instead of waiting for the next poll.

Spectrum analyser

Real band data from cava, mirrored around the centre and drawn across the collapsed pill too. Live follows cava frame-for-frame; Wave and Calm reshape it and provide a synthetic fallback.

Settings and themes

Black, Umbra, Gray and White palettes with contrast-safe text, plus live controls for clock style, language, hover behaviour, mini-player mode and animation visibility.

Player-only pill

Disable hover expansion and the collapsed island can keep only cover, title and previous/play/next. Clicking its empty surface opens the full panel.

YouTube artwork

Watch, Music, Shorts, Live, Embed and youtu.be URLs resolve to quality-checked thumbnails. Tiny placeholders are rejected and successful images are cached locally.

Pixel-art clock

A 5×7 glyph table rendered to a canvas, with vertical digit rolls and Turkish Ç/Ğ/İ/Ö/Ş/Ü included.

Time tools

Timer, stopwatch with laps, focus/break cycle and alarm, sharing one stage and one set of controls. Countdowns tick per second; the stopwatch is elapsed-time based, because it is the one readout showing hundredths, where drift would show. Completion changes the island's shape and plays a chime, and stays up until it is actually answered — a timer that finished while nobody was watching has not been acknowledged. A tool left running keeps a capsule on the collapsed pill, amber and quickening inside the last minute.

Synced lyrics

MPRIS has a lyrics field that essentially nothing fills in — Spotify reports it as an empty string — so lines come from LRCLIB, which needs no account or key. Fetched once per track and cached on disk, misses included, so a track without lyrics is not looked up again on every play. Nothing is fetched on the poll path.

Calls

An incoming call is recognised from the notification's own accept/decline actions, and answering or declining invokes those actions rather than faking input at the app. Whether a call is live is inferred from PipeWire instead — an app holding a playback and a capture stream at once is, by construction, mid-call — which is what makes the timer honest and covers calls answered on another device.

Inline reply

Notifications carrying an inline-reply action get a field and a send button, wired to the freedesktop reply signal.

English and Turkish

Switchable from a chip in the panel or over IPC, and remembered across restarts. With no saved choice it follows QS_ISLAND_LANG, then the session locale. Strings live in one file rather than inline, so nothing silently stays untranslated.

Device indicators

PipeWire microphone and V4L2 camera use raise a card the moment either starts or stops.

Meters

Volume, brightness and microphone gain as draggable segment bars, over wpctl and brightnessctl.

Weather and battery

Open-Meteo with IP geolocation, cached for fifteen minutes. Battery level, charge state and time-to-empty from sysfs and UPower.

Stays out of the way

Hides completely when the focused window goes fullscreen, and returns when it leaves.

Install

$ git clone https://github.com/lunanoir21/quickshell-dynamic-island.git
$ cd quickshell-dynamic-island
$ chmod +x backend.sh
$ quickshell -p ./Main.qml

# or drop it into an existing config and instantiate
# DynamicIslandModule.DynamicIslandHost {}

Two rules it is built on