GroveShell is an experimental desktop shell for Windows 11. It hides the taskbar and puts a top bar, per-monitor workspaces, and a GNOME-style Activities overview in its place.
It is written in Rust against Win32 and runs alongside Explorer. Quitting it restores the Windows taskbar and your windows. Because it is experimental, keep the recovery instructions handy when you try a new build.
Tap the Windows key to open Activities. The overview shows the current workspace with a live preview of each window, a strip of workspace thumbnails above it, a search field, and a dock with your pinned and running apps. Click a preview to focus that window, type to search, or drag a preview onto another workspace.
Each monitor has its own set of workspaces, so switching on one display leaves the others alone. The last workspace in the set is always empty. When you connect or disconnect a monitor, GroveShell moves the affected windows into a workspace you can reach.
Opening and closing Activities is one continuous motion, and nothing in it is a fade from one picture to another. The first frame is the desktop as it already is. From there the desktop shrinks into its card, each window travels from where it sits on screen into its slot in the grid, the dock slides up from below, and the thumbnail strip drops in from above. You can stop the motion halfway and reverse it.
A three- or four-finger swipe on a precision touchpad drives it directly. Swipe up and the overview opens as far as your fingers have travelled; hold still and it waits; swipe back down and it closes again. It settles only when you lift, and a flick carries on under its own momentum. Swiping sideways slides between workspaces the same way while the overview is open, and switches workspace when it is closed.
A two-finger scroll or the mouse wheel over the desktop does the same with less precision. Every animated surface is computed from one progress value per monitor, which is why the pieces stay in step.
Windows has its own three- and four-finger swipes (Task View and virtual desktops) and would run them at the same time, so GroveShell sets them to "Nothing" while it runs and puts your setting back when it quits. You can turn the swipes off under Settings > Input, which leaves Windows' own alone.
Every monitor gets an Activities button and workspace indicators. The primary display also has a clock and calendar, system status, settings, a power menu, and access to the Windows notification area.
The control center has tiles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, appearance, and radios, plus mute and a draggable volume slider. The arrow on each split button opens more options: a Wi-Fi network list with saved connections, Bluetooth pairing, themes, Windows airplane mode, audio devices, and the volume mixer.
You pick a saved Wi-Fi network inside GroveShell. The list shows signal strength and supports disconnect, refresh, and scrolling. Setting up a new network and entering its password go through Windows' own connection UI. GroveShell does not collect or store Wi-Fi passwords.
The panel uses Segoe UI, rounded surfaces, and the Windows accent color. It shows hover and keyboard focus, and its fade transitions respect reduced motion. Radio operations run in the background so they do not block painting.
Keyboard control:
- Tab moves between controls.
- Enter or Space activates the focused control.
- The arrow keys adjust the volume slider when it has focus.
- Escape goes back from an options page, or closes the panel.
GroveShell hosts the notification area itself while it runs. Applications hand their tray icons to it directly, so the primary bar shows each application's real icon and updates when the application changes it. A click goes to the application, a double click opens it where it expects one, and a right click opens its own menu.
The bar shows the icons you have switched on under Windows Settings > Personalisation > Taskbar > Other system tray icons. The chevron opens a panel with the rest, where they take the same clicks. Every icon message is also passed on to Explorer, so its tray is intact when GroveShell quits. ADR-011 has the details.
The gear in the top bar opens settings for bar height, dock placement and behavior, overview appearance, input, and accessibility. The Home page shows whether the shell's processes are running and has a Quit button, which stops the shell and brings back the Windows taskbar and Start menu. The dock can appear only in the overview, stay visible on the desktop, or auto-hide on the desktop. Appearance changes apply while GroveShell is running.
The shell follows the Windows accent color and supports high contrast, reduced motion, and per-monitor DPI scaling. Compatibility rules can exclude apps from workspace management. The compatibility notes list the tested configurations and the hardware checks still to do.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Open or close Activities | Tap the Windows key |
| Switch workspace on the focused monitor | Ctrl + Alt + Left / Right |
| Move the focused window to another workspace | Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Left / Right |
| Move a window | Windows key + left-drag |
| Resize a window | Windows key + right-drag |
| Search apps and windows | Type in Activities; Enter opens the top result |
| Open Activities with the mouse | Click Activities or use the top-left hot corner |
| Open or close Activities on a touchpad | Three- or four-finger swipe up / down |
| Switch workspace on a touchpad | Three- or four-finger swipe left / right |
You need Windows 11 x64 and Rust stable with the MSVC toolchain, plus the Windows SDK and the Visual Studio C++ build tools.
cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace
.\scripts\dev-start.ps1dev-start.ps1 builds the workspace and starts the watchdog, host, and UI
in the background. It then shows a dashboard with process status and a
graceful shutdown command. Use graceful shutdown to restore the taskbar,
work areas, and parked windows.
If the shell becomes unresponsive, run:
.\scripts\recover.ps1The script stops GroveShell processes and makes sure Explorer is running. It does not depend on a working GroveShell binary.
While GroveShell runs, the Windows taskbar is set to auto-hide and Windows'
own touchpad swipes are switched off. Quitting puts both back. If the UI
crashes or is killed, the watchdog puts them back within a few seconds. If
the watchdog was killed too, starting GroveShell and quitting it, or
running groveshell-cli restore-taskbar, does it.
The host and watchdog monitor process health. Structured, rotating logs are
written to %LOCALAPPDATA%\GroveShell\logs\. The CLI has ping,
shutdown, list-windows, list-monitors, and diagnostics commands, and
diagnostics can redact window titles. Telemetry is off by default.
- Workspace assignments do not persist across restarts.
- The radio tile switches the available radios together. It is not Windows' airplane-mode flag; its options page opens the actual Windows setting.
- Brightness, Night Light, and Do Not Disturb are not integrated controls.
- Network, volume and battery are GroveShell's own indicators. Windows 11 draws its versions inside Explorer, where they cannot be hosted.
- Touchpad swipes need a precision touchpad. Whether Windows stops running its own swipes straight away or only after the next sign-in varies by build, and has not been confirmed on hardware.
- Wi-Fi enumeration can require Windows location permission. If it is denied, the panel still gives access to Windows' network UI.
- Testing with Narrator, on mixed-monitor hardware, and over long sessions is not finished. Painted keyboard controls do not yet expose a complete UI Automation accessibility tree.
CONTRIBUTING.md covers how to contribute. The design document describes the architecture and future work, and the architecture decisions record the reasoning behind the design.
GroveShell takes workflow inspiration from GNOME Shell, using no GNOME code,
assets, or branding. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the GNOME
Foundation. Interface icons are from Lucide, with their
license included in crates/ui-kit/resources/icons/NOTICE.md.
Dual-licensed under Apache-2.0 or MIT.