synshell

A Wayland desktop environment written in Rust. It is split the way KDE Plasma is: a compositor (the KWin role), a separate shell process for panels, dock, launcher and notifications (the plasmashell role) and a System Settings app — plus a file manager and a screenshot tool. All of the UI is built with my own GUI framework, syngui; the compositor is built on smithay.

Almost everything is configured in one file, ~/.config/synshell/config.toml. The compositor and the shell watch it and apply changes live; System Settings edits the same file in place and keeps your comments.

Status

Early. One developer, one machine. The first commit is from September 2026, and the pace since then has been fast, so expect rough edges and config keys that still move. It runs as my login session on Arch Linux on a hybrid laptop (Intel Arrow Lake iGPU driving the internal 2560×1600 240 Hz panel at 1.4× scale, plus an NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop GPU). Multiple GPUs, monitor hotplug and other distributions are handled in the code, but no configuration other than this one has been tested.

The interface is in Russian only for now, and so is the documentation in docs/.

What is in the box

Binary	What it does
synwm	Compositor on smithay 0.7: DRM/KMS (multiple GPUs, hotplug, DPMS) or a nested window for development. Server-side decorations, workspaces, floating / tile / columns / grid / monocle layouts, snapping to edges and halves, window overview, Alt+Tab, window rules, Xwayland, a JSON IPC socket and the synwm msg CLI.
syndesktop-shell	The shell (layer-shell surfaces): wallpaper, panels with applets, dock, launcher, notification server (D-Bus), OSD, power menu, window switcher, system tray (StatusNotifierItem), lock screen (ext-session-lock + PAM). If it crashes, the compositor restarts it and your windows stay.
synmobile-shell	The phone shell (status bar, navigation bar, home screen). The compositor picks it automatically on a phone form factor; see docs/MOBILE.md.
syngame-shell	Game mode (gameshell): a fullscreen console-style launcher with the Steam library, covers, gamepad navigation and an in-game quick menu; every app runs fullscreen without frames. Switched on the fly with Super+G; see docs/GAMESHELL.md.
synkeyboard	Gboard-like on-screen keyboard: EN/RU, symbols, F1–F12, arrows, sticky Ctrl/Alt/Super, auto-show via input-method; synkeyboard type/key CLI.
synsettings	System Settings: 18 pages. Edits config.toml through toml_edit, so comments and ordering survive.
synfiles	A file manager modelled on Windows 11 Explorer: tabs in the title bar, dual pane, icons / tiles / list / details views, thumbnails, rubber-band selection, drag and drop, background operations with pause and cancel, Ctrl+Z, freedesktop trash, search. --viewer is a built-in image viewer (zoom, EXIF rotation, HEIC, folder filmstrip).
synlink	Links synshell devices (phone ↔ computer) over USB and Wi-Fi: QUIC with pinned keys, pairing (one tap over USB, code over Wi-Fi), screen, remote input, files (FUSE), notifications, a shared clipboard, ssh phone without knowing addresses, a CLI and an MCP server for Claude Code. See docs/LINK.md.
synpass	«Пароли» — password manager: a vault under a master password (Argon2id + XChaCha20-Poly1305), big copy buttons and a large character-by-character view, a generator, auto-lock and clipboard clearing; syncs with linked devices through synlink. See docs/PASSWORDS.md.
synlink-view	Shows and controls the screen of a linked device (damage-only frames, mouse as a finger on the phone).
synshot	Region / window / monitor screenshot on Print: the screen freezes, you drag a frame (handles, magnifier, arrow-key nudging) or click a window; copy, save, copy path or open.

Features

• Dock (mode = "dock" on any panel), in the spirit of the macOS dock and Latte Dock: the icon under the cursor grows above the bar, window indicators, launch bounce and particles, 3D tilt and spin on hover, a 3D shelf with reflections, groups (a popup with a grid, list or fan of icons), folders, autohide and intellihide. Everything is added and rearranged with the mouse in edit mode (right-click the panel → Edit). See docs/DOCK.md.
• Adaptive panel (defloat): a floating panel snaps to the screen edge at full length when a window is maximized or touches it, as in Plasma 6.
• Panel as a title bar: the window-title, window-buttons and global-menu applets, together with borderless_maximized, turn the top panel into the title bar of the maximized window. The global menu reads Qt/KDE menus (org_kde_kwin_appmenu, dbusmenu) and GTK 3 menus (gtk_shell1, org.gtk.Menus) — GIMP 3 included.
• Themes: 14 built-in (Nord, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Rosé Pine, Everforest, Dracula, Kanagawa, Solarized, Synthwave, Aurora, Sakura, Neobrutalism, Terminal), each with dark and/or light variants, a wallpaper and its own stylesheet; your own themes are a theme.toml plus MSS. Switching themes cross-fades colours without rebuilding surfaces. The palette is also exported to GTK 3/4, Qt/KDE (kdeglobals) and GIMP so that applications match. See docs/THEMES.md.
• Shell animations: popups flow out of the panel they belong to, notifications slide and re-stack, the launcher morphs between sections — all drawn by the shell with syngui animation primitives.
• Lock screen built into the shell (ext-session-lock, password checked through PAM), idle handling, screen capture for portals (wlr-screencopy, works with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr for browsers and OBS).

Launcher	Tile layout

System Settings — Themes, maximized under the panel-as-title-bar	Screenshot tool

Build and run

synshell path-depends on syngui, so check both repositories out next to each other:

git clone https://github.com/VitaminDB/syngui
git clone https://github.com/VitaminDB/synshell
cd synshell
cargo build --profile fast-release        # quick local build → target/fast-release
cargo build --release                     # LTO build → target/release

The workspace sets rust-version = "1.85". Build and runtime dependencies (Arch package names): mesa, libinput, seatd, systemd-libs, libxkbcommon, libdrm, vulkan-icd-loader, fontconfig, freetype2, dbus. Optional ones — xorg-xwayland, wireplumber, brightnessctl, networkmanager, playerctl, wl-clipboard, xdg-desktop-portal-wlr, ffmpegthumbnailer, libheif, imagemagick, breeze-icons — are listed with their purpose in the PKGBUILD.

Nested, inside your current Wayland or X11 session (it runs in a window):

PATH="$PWD/target/fast-release:$PATH" target/fast-release/synwm --nested

The compositor starts syndesktop-shell from PATH, hence the PATH prefix. A nested instance reads the same ~/.config/synshell/config.toml (written with defaults on first start) and, with the defaults, starts ~/.config/autostart/*.desktop and writes the theme colours into your GTK and KDE colour files (app_colors). To try it without touching your own setup, point it at a separate config directory (app_colors is skipped then) whose config.toml turns autostart off — every field is optional:

mkdir -p /tmp/synshell-test
printf '[general]\nxdg_autostart = false\n' > /tmp/synshell-test/config.toml
SYNSHELL_CONFIG_DIR=/tmp/synshell-test PATH="$PWD/target/fast-release:$PATH" \
    target/fast-release/synwm --nested

As a real session on Arch Linux:

cd packaging && makepkg -si                   # release build
cd packaging && SYNSHELL_PROFILE=fast-release makepkg -si   # faster local build

then pick “synshell” in your display manager. The package installs the binaries, the session file, a PAM file for the lock screen, portal configuration and the .desktop files.

Logs go to ~/.local/state/synshell/ (synwm.log, shell.log).

Controls

Main key bindings (any of them can be remapped in [keybindings]):

Keys	Action
Super+Return	terminal
Super+D / Alt+F1	launcher
Super+G	game mode (gameshell) and back
Alt+Space	run prompt
Super+1…9 / Super+Shift+1…9	go to workspace / move window to workspace
Super+←/→/↑/↓	snap to an edge, maximize, minimize
Super+T	cycle layout
Super+Tab	window overview
Alt+Tab	window switcher
Super+LMB / Super+RMB	move / resize a window
Print	screenshot of a region or window
Shift+Print / Alt+Print	screenshot of the screen / window straight to a file
Super+Escape	lock the screen
Super+Shift+E	power menu

Everything is also scriptable over IPC:

synwm msg windows | workspaces | outputs | layouts | events
synwm msg action "workspace 2"
synwm msg action "layout tile"
synwm msg action "spawn firefox"
synwm msg action "shell launcher"      # any shell command: launcher, edit-dock, lock, …
synwm msg window 5 minimize            # activate | close | maximize | floating | workspace N …
synwm msg restart-shell                # restart panels and menus, windows stay
synwm msg restart                      # restart the compositor (application windows close)

Documentation

The documentation in docs/ is in Russian:

• ARCHITECTURE.md — processes, crates, config loading, IPC protocol, shell commands, layer-shell namespaces, animations.
• DOCK.md — dock and panel icons, groups, folders, edit mode.
• THEMES.md — theme format, MSS variables, writing your own theme.
• FILES.md — the file manager and image viewer.
• LINK.md — linking the phone and the computer: screen, input, files, notifications, ssh, MCP.
• SOUNDS.md — event sounds and sound themes (own themes made by synthesis and ACE-Step, freedesktop themes).
• GAMESHELL.md — game mode: switching modes on the fly, fullscreen window policy, game library (Steam, .desktop, custom), gamepad.

The fully commented default config is crates/synshell-common/default-config.toml.

Related

• syngui — the Rust GUI framework (wgpu, MSS stylesheets, reactive signals) that every window and panel here is drawn with.
• synthos — a local AI desktop studio on the same framework; it picks up the synshell theme and window buttons when running in a synshell session.

How it is built

This project is vibe-coded. Since spring 2026 I write all of my projects with Claude Code: I decide what to build and how it fits together, describe each task, and review, run and test the result on my own machine — the model writes the code, the tests and most of the documentation. I use synshell as my own desktop session, so what is described here is what I run daily.

Support

synshell is free and open source, written by one person. If it is useful to you, you can support its development with a donation via PayPal.

Licence

synshell is dual-licensed: free under the GNU GPL v3.0 (with an additional permission for proprietary GPU/NPU runtime libraries), or under a commercial licence for companies that ship it in closed-source products. Versions up to 15 October 2026 remain under MIT OR Apache-2.0.