Glimpse - a minimal Wayland desktop shell for Niri
Hey folks,
I've been building Glimpse, a desktop shell for Niri, and wanted to share it here.
Backstory: I was a KDE user since the 3.5 days and contributed a bit during the KDE 4 era. I left KDE because I stopped liking how it looked on my machines, spent about two years on GNOME, then went through Hyprland and landed on Niri. Niri's workflow finally felt right, but I still needed everything that normally surrounds a compositor: a panel, wallpaper, lock screen, idle handling, night light. I tried Ironbar first and liked the direction but couldn't get it themed the way I wanted, so I ended up building my own.
Glimpse is what came out of that. It's three separate pieces (glimpse-shell, glimpse-wallpaper, glimpse-lock) that share one config file, so you can run just the wallpaper daemon if that's all you want, or the whole thing together.
What's in it:
- GTK4 layer-shell panel with a bunch of built-in applets: audio, battery, bluetooth, brightness, clipboard, clock with calendar, keyboard layout, mpris, network, next-event, notifications, workspace pager, privacy indicators, printing, removable drives, session controls, tray, weather. Plus custom command/exec applets if you want to write your own.
- Wallpaper and blurred backdrop daemon
- Lock screen with PAM auth and its own theming
- Night light, automatic (location-based) or on a fixed schedule
- Idle policy: a three-step ladder (monitors off, then lock, then suspend) with separate AC/battery profiles
- Everything configured in one readable TOML file, with CSS theming layered on top of a base pack
I'm not a professional designer. The current look is intentionally GNOME-ish, since that's what I'm used to and it matches the rest of my GTK apps. It's not the end goal, just where I started.
Worth being upfront about: I own the architecture, the config surface, and every integration and direction decision, but a lot of the routine implementation and fixes were done with AI assistance under my review. Take that for what it's worth to you.
It's packaged for Arch on the AUR: `yay -S glimpse-desktop-bin`.
GitHub: https://github.com/alex-oleshkevich/glimpse
Screenshots and full docs are in the README. Happy to answer questions, and if anyone with real UI/UX chops wants to help push the visual design further, I'd love the help.