---

v1.20 — Lucid 2. Every surface redrawn in Material You Expressive, a clock that is an app, a launcher that finds everything, sounds of its own, and a bar and settings you can shape, much of it from contributors. It's what I use daily. The shell shows the highlights once after you update; everything that landed in it, and in every version before it, is in the changelog. Rough edges are still possible and bug reports are welcome.

To hear about new versions, press Watch → Custom → Releases at the top of this page. Lucid also checks for itself: once a day it asks GitHub for the newest release and says so once, in a notification. See Updating.

Install

Lucid installs to ~/.config/quickshell and needs Arch Linux and Hyprland. Three commands:

git clone https://github.com/Sn3akyy1/lucid.git
cd lucid
./install.sh

That's it — the installer does the rest:

1. Checks your system — refuses to run anywhere it can't finish the job, rather than leaving you half-installed.
2. Installs dependencies — finds paru or yay and uses it, falling back to pacman for repo packages. It lists everything and asks before touching your system. Say no and it carries on, telling you which features won't work. This includes the apps Lucid ships pinned to the dock — several GB, mostly from the AUR. --no-apps skips them.
3. Copies the shell to ~/.config/quickshell, moving any existing config to ~/.config/quickshell.backup-<timestamp> first.
4. Sets up Hyprland — hyprland.lua and its modules: the keybinds, the window and layer rules, blur, animations, and an autostart that launches the shell on login. If you already have a config it is backed up and you are asked first; --no-hypr keeps yours untouched.
5. Sets up theming — the palettes, the wallpaper hook, and the matugen template. An existing matugen/config.toml is appended to, never replaced.
6. Applies the look — kitty's colours, its opacity and its fish shell, the starship prompt (wired into .bashrc, .zshrc and config.fish), the VSCode/VSCodium Matugen theme, and the GTK theme: adw-gtk3-dark with the FairyWren icons, written to gsettings and to both gtk-3.0 and gtk-4.0 settings.ini. --no-look skips this.
7. Pins the dock — reads your installed .desktop files and pins the real apps, so the dock is never a row of blank letter tiles.
8. Offers to restart a running instance onto the new files.

Then reload Hyprland so the new binds and rules take effect:

hyprctl reload

Or log out and back in, which picks up the autostart too. To start the shell by hand in the meantime, run qs.

Set a wallpaper from Settings → General on first run — that's what generates your colour palette.

Updating

Pull and re-run. Your settings, pinned apps, reminders, Shazam history and API keys are carried forward into the new install:

git pull
./install.sh

Lucid tells you when there is something to pull. Once a day it asks GitHub's public API for the newest release, and when that is newer than the version you installed it posts one notification — once per version, never again for the same one. The request is a plain curl for api.github.com/repos/Sn3akyy1/lucid/releases/latest and carries nothing about you or your machine; Settings → About shows what it found and turns it off.

qs ipc call updates status   # what it knows
qs ipc call updates check    # ask now

Older versions

v0.57 beta is a tag, so it stays exactly where it is:

git clone --branch v0.57 https://github.com/Sn3akyy1/lucid.git

It is on the releases page too, as a source archive. Nothing carries over between the two — v1.0.0 moved enough that it is worth installing fresh.

Installer options

Re-running the installer is how you update. It moves your existing ~/.config/quickshell to ~/.config/quickshell.backup-<timestamp>, installs the new shell files, then carries your settings, pinned apps, reminders, Shazam history and API keys forward into it. Nothing is deleted, and the backup stays where it is until you remove it.

Keybinds

The installer ships these in ~/.config/hypr/modules/binds.lua, along with the window rules, blur, animations and the autostart. Run hyprctl reload after installing to pick them up.

Ran with --no-hypr, or want to bind things yourself? Everything is exposed over IPC:

hl.bind("SUPER + SPACE",   hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- launcher toggle"))
hl.bind("SUPER + E",       hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- moji toggle"))
hl.bind("SUPER + L",       hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- lock lock"))
hl.bind("SUPER + Escape",  hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- session toggle"))
hl.bind("SUPER + S",       hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- snap toggle"))
hl.bind("SUPER + SHIFT + T", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- snap text"))
hl.bind("SUPER + SHIFT + C", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- snap color"))
hl.bind("SUPER + comma",   hl.dsp.exec_cmd("qs ipc call -- settings open"))

Special workspaces are Hyprland Lua rather than IPC. On a Lua config of your own, copy support/hypr/modules/specials.lua into ~/.config/hypr/modules/ and bind its functions the way Lucid's modules/binds.lua does:

local specials = require("modules.specials")
hl.bind("SUPER + SHIFT + M", specials.toggle("music"))

Keep the --. It is only strictly required when the call takes an argument — qs ipc call settings show bar fails with "The following argument was not expected: bar", while qs ipc call -- settings show bar works. It is harmless on argument-free calls, so using it everywhere saves you the surprise.

What's in it

Bar

Six modules, each a pill that expands into a panel. Settings lays them out: the bar has a left, a middle and a right zone, and every module can be moved between them and reordered inside them, or taken out of the bar entirely.

• Workspaces — live window previews per workspace, click to switch. With more than one display the dots gather into a run per display, marked on hover with its number from Settings → Displays, and the overview lays out a block per display, left to right as they stand on the desk. A scratchpad (special workspace) shows beside the dots only while it is open: the dots sink, and a chip comes up with its name and a glyph for each app stashed in it — a terminal for a terminal, a note for an editor, read off each app's own categories. Click a glyph to jump to that window, or drag windows in and out from the overview's scratchpad row
• Media — MPRIS controls, seek bar, art, and Shazam-style song ID (songrec)
• Tray — SNI system tray with working context menus
• Clock — the date beside the time, the time itself in a filled chip, and a five-page clock app behind them: the day with the weather and what is next, a month calendar with reminders that toast when they are due, countdown timers and a pomodoro, a stopwatch with laps, and world clocks. Whatever is counting shows in the pill as a chip with a ring. The pomodoro card opens onto its own options: presets, every length, a daily goal, whether breaks and focus sessions start by themselves, and do-not-disturb for as long as you are focusing
• Notifications — grouped by application, with inline reply for chat apps and progress bars for transfers. New ones stack under the bar, the newest growing out of the pill itself; do-not-disturb holds them back
• System — volume, brightness, battery, disk stats, plus full Wi-Fi and Bluetooth panels and a switcher for the audio output and input. Two rows of tiles underneath: the toggles (silence, awake, dark, airplane, location, mic) and the tools (capture, record, colour picker, keyboard, timer, session); Edit tiles adds more, such as the power profile, game mode and night light, which warms the screen through hyprsunset, fading in and out, by hand or from sunset to sunrise where you are (worked out locally, no network) or between set hours. Right-click its tile to pick how warm and when; Settings → Displays has the same. Turning it on or off while a schedule runs holds until the schedule next changes. The compact strip shows the keyboard layout (click it to switch). Hover any icon there and it names itself; click it and the panel opens on the page that icon belongs to

Two shapes, set in Settings: island (floating rounded pills) or notch (flush to the screen edge, with flares that blend into it).

Each module's card under Settings → Bar also picks its look, starting from the one above: the clock in one line or two, or with the time on its accent chip, and how the date reads; media as the turning disc, a still cover or just its bars, with a large-cover panel; workspaces as dots or numbers, how many always show and whether the wheel switches them; notifications as a count, a dot or an accent chip; and the tray collapsed or as every app's icon, in the app's own colours or the palette's, with a switch per app to keep it out.

With more than one display, Settings → Displays → The bar on its own → Every display puts a bar on each screen, showing that screen's workspaces. One of them, on the shell's display or the one in use, still turns into notification popups and answers the bar's qs ipc targets.

Drag a module by its handle to move it within a zone or into another one, or down into Not in the bar to take it out; the arrows and buttons beside it do the same thing. Also in Settings: how close the middle may come to either side before it gives way, and a button that puts every module back where Lucid ships it.

The System pill opens into a control centre — Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with full panels behind them, brightness and volume with the audio devices behind those, two rows of tiles you arrange yourself, what is playing, and CPU, memory, disk and battery.

The small tiles are yours to arrange, the way a phone's quick settings are. The pencil in the panel's header opens Edit tiles: drag a tile to move it, tap its − or drag it below the line to take it out, and tap anything under Tap to add to put it in. Clipboard, Emoji, Wallpaper, Theme, Widgets and Clear wait there to begin with, and Reset brings back the set Lucid ships.

The clock pill opens into the clock app, here on its Today page: the time, the weather through the day and the week ahead, and the next reminder. Around it, a stacked clock, what is playing, the month, the weather, the battery, the system and a to-do list.

Dock and launcher

A floating M3 toolbar that grows into the launcher rather than opening a second window over it. Pinned apps, running-window indicators, drag to reorder, optional magnification and auto-hide.

The launcher opens with a head that carries the Lucida mark, the modes as one row of pills, and what the results add up to. It is one search field over eight modes, each reachable by a pill, by Ctrl and its number, by Tab, or by a prefix you can type:

Type a sum in the search field for a calculator (2^3^2, right-associative). The answer takes a card above the results, set in display type; Return copies it.

Applications with a window already open carry the dock's own running mark beside their name, and the selected row says what Return will do with it. A search that finds nothing offers the four prefixes as chips you can click.

A typed search ranks more than apps: open windows, by their app or their title (Return switches to the window); apps' own actions such as New Private Window, listed under the app when you type its name; and lock, suspend, log out, restart and shut down from three letters, the last three asking for a second Return. Something that reads as an address gets a row of its own at the top when nothing matches it better. Each of these is a switch on the Launcher settings page, which can also put power buttons at the end of the empty search field.

The application list follows the desktop-entry spec properly: ~/.local/share/ applications overrides /usr/share/applications entry for entry, so an override marked NoDisplay really does hide the system copy, and OnlyShowIn / NotShowIn are honoured against XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP. Whatever is left that you still do not want, hover it and press the eye on the right of the row — the Launcher settings page lists everything you hid and brings any of it back. Hidden applications still launch from the dock and still name their windows.

The Power pill, and the Power row in the command palette, hand over to the full-screen session screen — the same one SUPER + Esc raises.

Searching apps ends with a web search row, so one field covers "open it" and "look it up". It is a switch on the Launcher settings page, along with the search engine — DuckDuckGo, Google, Brave, Startpage or Kagi.

Clipboard mode keeps what you copy and hands it back: pick an entry to put it back on the clipboard, Delete (or the button on the row) to drop one, and Clear history on the Launcher settings page to drop the lot. Images are kept too and preview in the row. cliphist is the store; the shell owns the wl-paste watchers that feed it, so history records for as long as the shell is running. Turn the whole thing off with the switch on the Launcher page.

Wallpaper mode: a carousel that previews as you move through it, and applies on the second press.

Desktop widgets

Cards you place on the wallpaper yourself. Right-click the desktop and pick Widget Panel, or pick Widgets in the launcher's mode bar, and a sheet slides in with every widget drawn live: drag one straight out to where it should sit, or click it to drop it in the first free spot. Drag it anywhere afterwards, pin it so it stops moving, and it comes back where you left it after a reboot.

The panel searches by name or by what a widget does, filters by kind, lists what is already out on On desktop — hover a row to find its card, click it for the card's sheet, lock or remove it there — and switches layouts on Layouts. While it is open your widgets come up over the windows with a − on each, and a card dragged back onto the sheet is taken off the desktop. Settings → Widgets holds the same gallery and every preset.

The widget panel on its Clock gallery: drag a card onto the desktop, or click it to add it. Out on the desktop, a Coming up card and lucidfetch, each with its − while the panel is open.

Eighteen kinds, sixty-one looks between them — every category ships several variants of the same data:

Every widget has its own sheet — right-click it, or use the gear that appears on hover. It draws every style of that widget as a live thumbnail, so you pick the look by seeing it, and holds the card's colour (auto, or any Material container), its size, and its own options: 12- or 24-hour, which metrics to show, °C or °F, a note's tint, and so on. Most take one of four sizes; the visualiser instead grows an outline with handles when you hover it, and you drag any edge or corner to whatever shape you want.

Dragging snaps to the screen edges and centre lines and lines up with the other widgets, with guides while you drag. They can go anywhere on the screen, including the strips the bar and the dock reserve — a full-width visualiser tucked under the dock is the point. Widgets sit below your windows by default so they behave like a desktop, and step aside for fullscreen windows; both are switches on the Widgets page if you would rather they float on top.

Special workspaces

Scratchpads that slide over whatever workspace you are on, and hide again with the same keys.

A key starts its workspace's app if it is not running, and pulls it back in if you moved it somewhere else; opened from the launcher or the dock, the app lands in its workspace too. SUPER + ALT + S stashes the focused window in the scratchpad and, pressed inside a special workspace, sends it back. The scratchpad key also puts away whichever workspace is up, so one key always returns you to what you were doing.

Settings → Workspaces picks each one's apps, turns any of them off, and sets how far the screen behind dims, whether it blurs too, how much margin the windows keep from the screen's edges, and whether switching workspace puts them away. New workspace makes one of your own, with a name, a mark for the bar and any apps; its key goes into keybinds.json like any other, so it shows on the cheatsheet and is changed on the Keybinds page. Deleting it brings its windows back to the workspace you are on. Add an app offers everything installed, not only the catalogue above, and works out what to match its window by. It writes ~/.config/hypr/lucid-specials.lua, which modules/specials.lua reads on every key press, so a change applies without a Hyprland reload.

Windows

Settings → Windows changes how Hyprland draws your windows, live, with a preview drawn from the values in force: the gaps between windows and around the screen, border width and colour (none, your palette's accent, or a gradient through three of its colours, which follows the theme as it changes), a faint border on the other windows, how round the corners are and their shape, a shadow, and dimming the windows you are not in. Under Tiling: the layout (dwindle, master or scrolling) and each one's own options — which way dwindle splits and where a new window goes, the master's side and size, the width of a scrolling column — with a preview of the whole screen for one to five windows, and a switch that takes a lone window edge to edge, without gaps, border or rounded corners. Under Behaviour: whether focus follows the cursor or waits for a click, whether an app may take the focus when it asks, the cursor jumping with the focus, resizing a window by its edges, floating windows snapping to each other and to the screen, hiding the cursor while typing or after a while, and window animations.

Only what you change there is Lucid's. It goes to ~/.config/hypr/lucid-settings.lua, which modules/settings.lua applies without a reload; everything else stays as your Hyprland config has it, and each row's reset hands its option back to your config. hyprland.lua requires the module before anything of your own, so a file you add after it — hypr-user.lua, HyprMod's hyprland-gui — still wins: the row says which file sets the option and stays shut until it is taken out there.

Input

Settings → Input holds the keyboard side of Hyprland, through the same lucid-settings.lua as the Windows page and with the same rule that your own config wins: your layouts in order (the first is the one every keyboard starts with), each picked by name from the system's list of layouts and variants, the key that switches between them, what Caps Lock does — the other keyboard options your config sets are kept — key repeat delay and speed, and Num Lock at sign-in, with a field to try it all out. Then the mouse — pointer speed, acceleration, natural scrolling, scroll speed, left-handed buttons — and, when there is one, the touchpad: tap to click, natural scrolling, scroll speed, off while typing, two-finger right click, tap and drag, and a middle click from both buttons — and the swipe between workspaces: how far the fingers travel, which way, how fast a flick switches anyway, how far along letting go still switches, going past the neighbour and making a new workspace at the end.

Everything else

• Users and accounts — the card at the top of the Settings rail opens a Users and Accounts page for every account on the machine: full name, username, account type, login shell, email and location, with the guards that matter — the last administrator cannot demote themselves and a signed-in account cannot be renamed. Set a password or have the account choose its own at the next sign-in, add and remove accounts, toggle supplementary groups, and pick a picture from the stock faces or any image. It all goes through AccountsService, so the shell's own polkit dialog does the asking and nothing runs as root
• Account picture history — changing your account picture keeps the old one on a shelf in the picker, newest first, so any picture you have worn is a click away. It holds twelve or 8 MB, drops the oldest as new ones arrive, files nothing twice, and can be emptied outright
• Authentication prompts — Lucid is the session's polkit agent, so every request for an administrator on the machine comes up in the shell's own dialog rather than KDE's. polkitd and PAM are still the backend; the dialog names the action, shows which account's password it wants (with the picture from the Users page) and lets you pick a different administrator when polkit will accept more than one
• Lock screen — a real WlSessionLock that checks the password through PAM, laid out the way Material You lays out a lock screen: an oversized two-line clock in the wallpaper's own colour, the weather, battery, network and Bluetooth at a glance, what is playing, the notifications and a power bar that asks before it logs you out. Start typing and it focuses — the wallpaper blurs further and everything but the sign-in card steps back. It counts your remaining tries against faillock, warns about Caps Lock, shows the keyboard layout, and will not let a notification launch anything while it is up
• Login screen — the lock screen ported to SDDM, so the machine looks like itself before you have signed in: the same clock, the same palette and the same wallpaper, blurred once in advance rather than on a cold GPU, with the user and session pickers where the glance chips sit. It is painted from the running shell's own colours, so it follows a theme change. Every account keeps its own wallpaper and palette there, and picking another account crossfades the screen to theirs. The installer copies it in when SDDM is present but never switches to it — which theme greets you stays your call
• Session screen — SUPER + Esc, the control centre's Session tile or the launcher's command list. Lock, sleep, log out, restart and shut down, each on its own expressive shape that morphs as you move along the row with the arrow keys. The three that cost you work ask twice: the first press arms the shape in red with a ring that runs out after four seconds, and only the second goes through
• On-screen keyboard — SUPER + K, the desktop's right-click menu or the launcher's command list. It never takes the focus off what you are typing into, and clicks outside it reach the application underneath, so the caret stays where you put it. A letters layer and a function layer, modifiers that latch on one press and lock on two, and chords sent as chords. Drag it anywhere by the strip along its top and it stays there
• Emoji picker — emoji, kaomoji and GIFs (Giphy or Tenor), with recents, favourites and skin-tone variants; pastes into the focused window
• Screenshots — region select, full screen, and screen recording with optional mic and system audio. What you took then floats in the corner as a card: click it to open, drag it straight into a chat or a file manager, or copy, mark it up, show it in its folder or send it to the trash. It slides away after a few seconds, or stays while the pointer rests on it; a recording gets the same card with a frame from the video. General → Screenshots swaps the card for the old notification, or for nothing
• Text copier — the Text mode in the screenshot toolbar. Drag a box over anything on screen — an image, a video still, a PDF, an error dialog, a window that will not let you select its text — and the words inside it land on your clipboard. Runs the crop through tesseract twice, once inverted, and keeps the better read, so light-on-dark UI text works as well as a scan. Emoji come across too: tesseract has none in its character set and either drops them or reads them as junk letters, so anything colourful and square is matched against the glyphs of your installed emoji fonts instead. One flat colour means text, many means emoji. A shape it cannot name is left out rather than guessed at. Reading takes a moment, so the overlay does not vanish on release: the toolbar, the shade and the box you drew all stay, and a beam sweeps the selection until the text is on the clipboard, at which point it closes itself. The result lands as a toast under the bar rather than a desktop notification
• Colour picker -- the Colour mode hands off to hyprpicker. Choosing it drops the freeze, the shade and the crosshair and lets clicks through, so the toolbar is left floating over a live, usable desktop. Pick HEX, RGB or HSL, then hit the eyedropper: the toolbar stays up over hyprpicker, you click a pixel, and the value is copied and shown in a toast with the colour beside it. The output template is set per format, so the zoom lens, the clipboard and the toast all read the same and all three are valid CSS (#RRGGBB, rgb(r, g, b), hsl(h, s%, l%)). Cancelling the pick leaves you on the toolbar; picking a colour ends the session. The toast shows the colour as itself rather than as an icon. hyprpicker is asked for raw components and the string is built here, so the swatch, the clipboard and the format all agree
• Toasts -- a compact pill under the bar for things that just need saying. Any script can raise one: qs ipc call -- toast show game "Game Mode On", or toast warn alert "..." for the red variant. Named icons are copy, check, alert, info, text, game and camera; anything else is taken as a raw SVG path
• Notifications — a Notifications page for how they behave: whether popups appear at all, how long one stays and whether an application may set its own timeout, how much of the message and how many action buttons show, do-not-disturb with quiet hours between two times and a rule for fullscreen windows, a notification sound picked from Lucid's own eight with its own volume, how many the list keeps, per-application muting, and switches for grouping by application, showing how long ago each arrived, progress bars, inline reply, and how many popups stack at once. Its System events card picks what the machine itself gets a toast for: the keyboard layout, game mode, the charger and battery, Bluetooth and USB devices (the laptop's built-in parts stay quiet), the camera turning on and off with the app using it, Wi-Fi, the sound output, displays and the power profile
• OSD — volume, brightness and microphone, each a badge and a level; Caps Lock and Num Lock get one too, showing the letters the next keystroke will make — ABC against abc — rather than the words on and off
• Desktop — drag across empty desktop and a translucent accent box follows the cursor, the way it does on Windows and macOS; it is cosmetic and selects nothing. Right-click the desktop for wallpaper, theme, the widget panel, a screenshot and settings. Both are switches on the General page
• Date and time — a Date & Time page in Settings holds where the shell thinks it is. Turn on Auto-detect location — the same switch as the GPS tile in the bar's system panel — and your position is read from your network connection every few hours; leave it off and name a town yourself. One forecast is fetched for that position from Open-Meteo and shared by the bar clock, the lock screen and the weather widget, so the three can never disagree. The time zone on that page is the machine's, not a private one: picking a zone runs timedatectl set-timezone behind a polkit prompt, so every application on the box moves together and Lucid can never drift from the rest of your desktop. Switch on Set it from my location and a new position brings the zone with it. A program reads the zone once when it starts, so anything already open stays on the old one until you restart it — Lucid corrects for that itself and is right either way
• Network — a Network page covering what NetworkManager can do. Wi-Fi radio, a live network list grouped into connected, saved and nearby, with a filter, a scan you can stop, per-network join with password, forget and join-automatically, and a form for hidden networks. Share on a saved network shows it as a QR code a phone camera joins from, with the password beside it, dotted until you ask and copied without landing in clipboard history; the Wi-Fi panel in the bar has the same code behind a button. Below that: wired devices with link speed, VPN and WireGuard profiles to connect and disconnect, a Wi-Fi hotspot to share the connection, and every saved profile with its autoconnect switch. Each device also gets its addressing — IPv4, IPv6, gateway, DNS, MAC, MTU, link rate — and an IP configuration editor that switches between DHCP and a hand-set address, gateway and DNS, or just overrides DNS while leaving the rest automatic. Scriptable with qs ipc call network status | list | rescan
• Sound — a Sound page for what plays and what listens. Every output and every input the machine has, each one named, with what it is doing right now — its mode and the socket the sound comes out of — and a tick on the one in use. Click another and it takes over; anything already playing moves across with it, which is the part that is usually missing. Open a device for its own volume, its socket — speakers, the headphone jack, the digital output, with the unplugged ones said to be unplugged — and its mode, the card profile that decides what devices it offers at all. Below that, everything making or taking sound right now: a volume and a mute of its own per program, and a device of its own, so one application can play somewhere else while the rest stay put. A visualiser or a screen recorder sitting on a monitor is left where it is rather than dragged onto a microphone. It reads PipeWire directly and hears about changes as they happen, so it agrees with pavucontrol and with whatever else you use. System sounds mark a USB or Bluetooth device coming and going, the charger, low battery, the camera turning on and off and a screenshot, each with its own switch and a button to hear it, under one volume; they keep quiet while you are silenced, apart from the battery warnings. Tiny ticks answer the volume, brightness, Caps Lock and microphone keys — once where a drag or a held key starts and once where it stops. The page also shows what a device is doing: a live meter under the output and the microphone volume, balance and a Left/Right test for a stereo output, a way to put an app back on the default device, and a Behaviour card for WirePlumber's own settings (remembering each app's volume and device, following the default, pausing when headphones go, headset call mode, mono). The sounds are synthesised by support/sounds/build-sounds.py into assets/sounds; the ticks start from Kenney's Interface Sounds, which are CC0. Scriptable with qs ipc call settings sound, and qs ipc call sounds play <name> plays any of them
• Bluetooth — a Bluetooth page in Settings is a full manager: the radio, discoverability, whether the machine accepts pairing requests, and the name other devices see. Below it every device the adapter knows, grouped into connected, paired and available, with a filter, a scan that stops itself after a minute, and per device: connect, pair, forget, rename, auto-reconnect, allow-wake, block, and battery where the device reports it. A connected pair of headphones also gets its audio mode — high quality versus headset, whichever profiles PipeWire offers for it — so switching to the microphone no longer means a trip to pavucontrol
• Phone — a Phone page that is a real KDE Connect client, not a launcher for someone else's. It drives the KDE Connect daemon over D-Bus, so it pairs, unpairs and answers pairing requests with the verification key shown on both sides. Open a connected device and you get: send files through the desktop's own file chooser, send text or a link, ring it, lock it, mount and browse its storage, send your clipboard, run the commands you set up on it, its notifications with dismiss and inline reply, a media remote with seek and volume for whichever player it is running, its system volume, and a touchpad and keyboard that drive the phone from this machine. Every per-device feature can be switched off individually. The phone widget on the desktop browses the phone's files too, greys out whatever the phone has switched off, and steps between phones when more than one is paired. Scriptable too — qs ipc call kdeconnect status, list, rescan, and qs ipc call -- kdeconnect ring <id>
• Storage — a Storage page for what fills your drives: how much each kind of file takes, a map you can zoom through from your home folder or the whole disk, what could go (package caches, old trash, duplicates and large files in your own folders, each with a confirm), and the drives themselves, with their health from smartctl and mounting through udisksctl. It warns when space runs low and can empty trash after a number of days
• Idle and sleep — an Idle page that owns hypridle for you. It writes ~/.config/hypr/hypridle.conf and restarts the daemon whenever something on the page changes, so the ladder — dim, lock, screen off, suspend — is set with sliders rather than by hand. A rail at the top of the page shows the sequence in the order it actually fires and warns when two steps are out of turn. Extras worth knowing: keep awake, a caffeine toggle that holds every step until you turn it off; never interrupt something playing, which asks playerctl before each step; a suspend that can be limited to battery only; and lock-before-sleep plus wake-the-screen-on-resume. Whatever was in your hypridle.conf first is read into the page once and copied to hypridle.conf.pre-lucid, so nothing is lost. Scriptable with qs ipc call idle status | keepawake | on | off | restart
• Environment — an Environment page that owns the desktop's appearance outside the shell. Cursor theme, size and shadow, icon theme, GTK theme, light or dark, the Qt style, and the interface, application, document and monospace fonts. Pointer shadow has no compositor switch behind it — the shade is painted into the cursor theme's own images — so turning it off renders the theme again from its vector sources into ~/.local/share/icons/<theme>-noshadow, copying the original's sizes, hotspots and frame delays exactly, and points everything at that copy. The point is that one choice reaches everywhere: each change is written to GTK 2, 3 and 4, to gsettings, to the XCursor fallback theme, to qt5ct and qt6ct, and to Hyprland's env module, and hyprctl setcursor runs so the pointer changes under your hand rather than at the next login. The dock picks a new icon theme up the moment you choose it — Qt only reads the icon theme when a process starts, so Lucid walks the theme directories itself. Only the keys Lucid owns are touched — every comment and every other setting in those files stays where it was, and a toolkit this machine does not use is skipped rather than conjured. It starts by reading what the machine already says, so opening the page changes nothing; Re-read from the system picks those values up again after you have changed appearance with another tool. Turn GTK, Qt or Hyprland off individually if you would rather keep one of them by hand. Scriptable with qs ipc call settings environment
• Displays — a Displays page for the screens themselves: resolution, refresh rate, scale, orientation and adaptive sync, one card per output, which names the panel and its size and says what it is doing right now. Only modes the display actually reports are offered, so there is no picking one it cannot show, and each scale is labelled with the room it leaves for windows — with a word of warning on the ones that do not divide the panel evenly. More than one screen adds an arrangement you drag: displays snap to their neighbours' edges so the pointer has no gaps to fall into, and moving one pins them all where they already are rather than letting Hyprland shuffle the rest. A display can mirror another or be switched off, except the last one left on, which neither the page nor the Hyprland module will let go. The shell itself — the bar, the dock, the volume popup and the toasts — sits on whichever display you pick, and widgets with no display of their own follow it; the bar and the dock can each be sent to a display of their own if you would rather have them apart. The wallpaper and the desktop menu are drawn on all of them either way, and so is the lock screen — though only the display the shell is on carries the password field; the rest show the clock. Unplug the display it was pinned to and it moves to one that is left, without losing the pick, so plugging back in puts it back. It all becomes monitor rules in ~/.config/hypr/lucid-monitors.lua, applied without a reload, and a display is keyed by its description rather than its port, so moving the cable keeps what you set. Scriptable with qs ipc call settings displays, and the display the shell sits on with qs ipc call -- displays shell <name|here|next|auto> — worth a keybind if you move between screens
• Glass — a Glass page holding one slider for how far the desktop shows through what is in front of it, and a readout of where that lands. Three surfaces follow it, each as far as it can take: the shell's own panels, kitty — whose background_opacity leaves the text alone, so it can go all the way — and app windows, a quarter as far, because Hyprland fades a window's text along with its background. Any installed app can be frosted on its own, and anything else you have open can be added by its window class. Per-app values become Hyprland window rules in ~/.config/hypr/lucid-glass.lua, applied without a reload and pushed onto windows that are already open. Scriptable with qs ipc call settings glass
• Settings — a GUI for all of the above, no config file editing. Twenty-five pages behind a collapsible rail, grouped-list cards, an app bar that collapses as you scroll, and a reset arrow on anything you have moved off its default. The search field at the head of the rail finds any option by its name or its description and opens its page scrolled to it; Ctrl+F, or just start typing. Scriptable with qs ipc call -- settings search <words>. The General page sets how big the whole shell is (Interface size, 75 to 125 %, without touching the monitor's scale) and how round (Corner rounding, square to half as round again). The first start after an update opens a What's new sheet once; About → What's new brings it back

The lock screen — the clock in the wallpaper's own colour, the weather, battery, network and Bluetooth at a glance, what is playing, the notifications, and the power bar in the corner.

The screenshot toolbar — Photo, Video, Text and Colour, then a region or the whole display — over the desktop it is about to take.

Settings on the Sound page: Lucid's own system sounds, each with a switch and a play button, under one volume for all of them.

Settings on the Storage page — what fills the drive, by kind and as a map you can zoom through — with the control centre and the on-screen keyboard open beside it.

Theming

Colours come from one of eight palettes, picked in Settings or via the launcher's Theme mode:

Matugen and Pywal generate a palette from your current wallpaper. Your colour builds one from a single colour you pick, and leaves the wallpaper alone. Catppuccin Mocha, Gruvbox, Nightfox, Nord and Tokyo Night are fixed palettes that don't change with the wallpaper. Anything you import sits alongside them, and the whole list can be dragged into the order you want.

Every palette has a light mode too — Light or dark on the Theme page. Matugen and Pywal re-extract the wallpaper in the mode you pick, Your colour is built again from its colour; the fixed palettes get a light version built from their own colours, so Nord lands on its own Snow Storm and Gruvbox on its own cream. An imported light scheme goes the other way: light mode keeps it exactly as its author made it, and its dark mode is built from its own colours. Light surfaces carry a trace of the accent, and Accent tint on the General page sets how much. The mode is remembered beside the theme, and GTK and Qt applications follow it, switching to the light or dark counterpart of their theme where one is installed.

Generated palettes, at the top of Settings → Colours, shapes what Matugen and Your colour build:

• Your colour — the colour itself: typed as hex, picked from anywhere on screen (with hyprpicker), or one of a handful to start from.
• Style — matugen's nine scheme types, from the calm Tonal it uses by default through Vibrant, Expressive and Fidelity to Neutral and Monochrome.
• Contrast — from −100 % to +100 %; 0 is the design as specified.
• Colour from the wallpaper — Matugen starts from the wallpaper's most dominant colour. This shows the others it finds (up to four), each as the accent it would give, to start from instead. The pick belongs to that wallpaper: change the picture and it starts from its most dominant again.

Changes apply as you make them, to the shell and every app template.

Light mode, with the palette taken from the wallpaper. The bar, the dock and every widget follow it.

Whichever is active, the shell reads ~/.cache/quickshell/matugen.json — a flat map of Material 3 colour roles. Changing your wallpaper through Lucid runs ~/.config/hypr/scripts/wallpaper/set-wallpaper.sh, which sets the wallpaper and then regenerates that file if the active theme is wallpaper-derived.

Hyprland's window borders follow it as well. modules/decorations.lua reads the same file, primary for the focused window and surface container for the rest, and the shell re-applies it every time the palette changes, light mode included.

So does the starship prompt, without Lucid owning it: only the [palettes.colors] table in ~/.config/starship.toml is repainted, so a prompt you have designed yourself keeps its shape. Point its styles at color1 to color9 (the comment above that table says which colour each one carries) and they follow every theme.

Every display gets the same picture, cropped to fill. To treat one differently — a portrait screen that should letterbox rather than crop, or a second screen with a picture of its own — put a rule in ~/.config/lucid/wallpaper-outputs.conf, one output a line:

DP-3      --resize fit --fill-color 000000
HDMI-A-1  ~/Pictures/wallpapers/second.jpg

Any argument that is a file becomes that output's picture; the rest is passed to awww/swww. Outputs with no rule keep the wallpaper you picked, and colours are still generated from that one. qs ipc call displays list prints your outputs, left to right.

If you already use matugen, the installer appends its Quickshell template to your config.toml and backs up the original — your existing templates are left alone.

Every template in ~/.config/matugen/config.toml follows whichever palette is active, not only the wallpaper ones: picking Nord or Catppuccin renders them with that theme's colours. That makes the config the place to theme any other application — put a template in ~/.config/matugen/templates/ and add a block for it:

[templates.myapp]
input_path = '~/.config/matugen/templates/myapp.css'
output_path = '~/.config/myapp/colors.css'
post_hook = 'pkill -USR1 myapp'   # optional: tell the app to reload

Templates use matugen's syntax — {{colors.primary.default.hex}} and so on. A fixed palette fills every role it defines with its own colour; the few it doesn't (the *_fixed family, the tonal palettes, base16) come from a scheme matugen derives from its primary. Each template renders on its own, so one that fails doesn't hold the rest back: a toast names it, and ~/.cache/lucid/templates.json keeps what happened to every template on the last change, with matugen's error for the ones that failed. ~/.config/lucid/render-templates.sh is what renders them, for the wallpaper and the fixed palettes alike.

Settings → Colours (qs ipc call settings colours) shows the same thing without opening the file:

• App templates lists every template with the file it writes and how the last change went, matugen's reason included when one failed. A switch turns a template off (its block stays in the config, commented out) or back on, in which case it renders at once with the current colours. Render again redoes all of them without touching the wallpaper.
• Add an app offers the templates Lucid ships for applications you have installed but that aren't wired up yet — installed after Lucid, say.
• Your own template adds one from a file or an https:// link. Try it shows what it writes with your colours, or why it can't, before it's added. Below it, every colour role of the current palette: click one to copy the variable that writes it, as #rrggbb, rrggbb, rgb(), rgba() or hsl().

~/.config/lucid/templates.py does the editing, and runs from a terminal too (templates.py list, set <name> on|off, add, remove, try). The config is copied to config.toml.lucid-backup before each change.

Adding your own theme

Settings → Palettes (qs ipc call settings palettes) has a gallery of the few hundred base16 and base24 schemes that tinted-theming collects, each drawn in its own colours, searchable, and split into dark and light. Download fetches the whole collection once (about half a megabyte, kept in ~/.cache/lucid/schemes); after that, hovering a scheme offers Add, which makes it one of your themes, and Use, which also switches to it.

The same page takes the URL of any colour-scheme repo, or a scheme file you already have, clones or reads it, and builds a full Material 3 palette out of what it finds. Scheme repos agree on no common format, so detection is tiered: base16 and base24 YAML, name-keyed JSON (Catppuccin and friends) and palettes Lucid exported are read exactly, and anything else falls back to harvesting hex codes and sorting them by tone and chroma. A repo carrying several variants lists them so you can pick one, and wallpapers in the repo come along with it.

Nothing from the repo is ever executed — only text is parsed and only images are copied.

It writes ~/.config/lucid/themes/<id>/{quickshell.json,meta.json} and ~/Pictures/wallpapers/<id>/, which you can also do by hand: a quickshell.json with the same keys as the bundled palettes is all a theme is. The importer runs from a terminal too, on a repo URL or a local file or folder:

python3 ~/.config/lucid/add-theme.py <repo-url|file|folder> [--list] [--variant <name>] [--name <label>]
python3 ~/.config/lucid/scheme-gallery.py update    # the gallery, downloaded and indexed

Further down the page, the editor works on the palette on screen. Six key colours (background, text, primary, secondary, tertiary, error) each rebuild the whole palette the way an imported scheme is built, and every other role can be set by itself; the shell wears the draft while you work, and Save as theme keeps it (Discard, or closing Settings, puts the palette back). Export writes the palette on screen to a file: a Lucid palette, which keeps every role and imports back exactly, or base16 YAML for tinted-theming's tools and anything else that reads base16.

The exporter runs from a terminal too:

python3 ~/.config/lucid/palette-edit.py export ~/.cache/quickshell/matugen.json <lucid|base16> <file> [<name>]

Requirements

Arch Linux and Hyprland. The installer handles all of this, listed here so you know what's being pulled in.

Required — the shell won't start without these:

quickshell · qt6-5compat · qt6-declarative · qt6-multimedia

Per feature — a missing one breaks only its own feature:

The Hyprland config and the look — installed unless you pass --no-hypr or --no-look. The binds shell out to these, so a missing one is a dead key:

The dock's default pins — installed unless you pass --no-apps. Several GB, mostly from the AUR:

zen-browser-bin · vscodium-bin · spotify · vesktop · nautilus · steam · proton-vpn-gtk-app

Anything you already have an equivalent of is left alone — vscodium counts for vscodium-bin, discord for vesktop, and so on. steam is skipped unless the multilib repo is enabled.

Lucid uses Hyprland-specific APIs for workspaces and window management. It will not work on other compositors.

Fonts

The default UI font is Google Sans, which is not in the Arch repos. If you don't have it, Qt falls back to your default sans and everything still works — or pick any installed font in Settings → General.

Optional setup

GIF search needs a free Giphy key (email only, no card) from developers.giphy.com. Put it in ~/.config/quickshell/lucidmoji/config.json:

{ "giphyKey": "your-key-here", "tenorKey": "", "gifDir": "" }

Tenor works too if you'd rather use that. Emoji and kaomoji need no key.

Wallpapers default to ~/Pictures/wallpapers, one folder per theme — ~/Pictures/wallpapers/gruvbox is what the strip shows while you are on Gruvbox. The installer puts a set in each of them, skipping any file you already have, and --no-wallpapers leaves the folder alone entirely. Change the folder in Settings → General, which then applies to every theme.

IPC reference

Every surface is scriptable. qs ipc call -- <target> <function> [arg]:

Uninstall

./uninstall.sh

Moves ~/.config/quickshell aside rather than deleting it, so your settings survive. Packages installed by install.sh are left alone. It prints what else it left in place — the matugen template blocks, ~/.config/hypr, starship.toml and its init lines in your rc files, kitty's colour and opacity includes — each with a timestamped backup beside it, so you can undo them by hand.

Troubleshooting

The media popup's visualiser sits flat and never moves. cava is running without ~/.config/cava/quickshell.conf — its own defaults emit ncurses output rather than the raw ascii frames the strip parses, so there is nothing to draw. Re-run the installer, or copy support/cava/quickshell.conf there yourself. Before v1.0.0 this showed as one enormous bar covering the popup instead.

Another app's notifications show instead of Lucid's. org.freedesktop.Notifications is a single-owner D-Bus name. Lucid's bar serves it, but any other notification daemon that is merely installed — swaync, dunst, mako — gets D-Bus-activated by the first notification and then keeps the name for the whole session. It does not need to be autostarted to win. Check who holds it:

busctl --user status org.freedesktop.Notifications | grep PID

If that is not quickshell, mask the daemon and log back in:

systemctl --user mask swaync.service   # or dunst.service, mako.service
pkill swaync

The installer offers to do this for you.

GTK apps are light, or their icons are wrong. Under Hyprland there is no xsettings daemon, so GTK3/GTK4 read ~/.config/gtk-{3,4}.0/settings.ini while GNOME apps and portals read gsettings. The installer writes both. If only some apps changed, check they agree:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme    # adw-gtk3-dark
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme   # FairyWren_Dark
grep -E 'theme-name' ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini

The icons live in ~/.local/share/icons/FairyWren_Dark. If that directory is missing the installer could not reach GitLab — clone it by hand from https://gitlab.com/FreshDoctor/FairyWren-Icons.

Nothing appears when I run qs. Check qs log for QML errors, and confirm you're on Hyprland — Lucid needs its Wayland protocols.

Everything is grey / colours look wrong. The palette cache is missing or empty. Set a wallpaper through Settings → General, or copy a bundled palette: cp ~/.config/lucid/themes/nord/quickshell.json ~/.cache/quickshell/matugen.json

The blur frosts my windows instead of the desktop. Hyprland's blur samples whatever is behind the layer. Lucid leaves that on so a panel opened over a window shows the window; if you would rather have every pill frost the wallpaper, uncomment the xray line at the end of ~/.config/hypr/modules/layerrules.lua, or add this to hyprland.lua:

hl.layer_rule({ match = { namespace = "quickshell" }, xray = true })

A Lua config cannot source a .conf file, so the old layerrule = xray 1, quickshell line has nowhere to go.

Icons look blurry. A fractional monitor scale factor puts icons on fractional pixels. Use an integer scale, or adjust the icon size in Settings.

Animations feel choppy on an NVIDIA card, even at 144Hz or higher. Qt's Wayland plugin refuses threaded OpenGL on the proprietary NVIDIA driver — that is its workaround for QTBUG-95817 — so Qt Quick falls back to the basic render loop, whose animation driver is a fixed ~16ms timer with no vsync awareness. Every animation in the shell is then pinned to ~60fps however fast the monitor runs, which is why Hyprland stays smooth while Lucid does not.

Lucid starts through ~/.config/lucid/launch-shell.sh, which moves those machines to Qt's Vulkan backend — Vulkan carries no such vendor check, so the threaded loop and its vsync-driven animations come back. Ask it what it decided:

~/.config/lucid/launch-shell.sh --explain

It only switches when NVIDIA is the GPU the compositor actually renders on, the driver is 555 or newer, and an NVIDIA Vulkan driver is present. Mesa already gets the threaded loop and is left alone. Override the detection with LUCID_RHI_BACKEND=vulkan or LUCID_RHI_BACKEND=opengl; an existing QSG_RHI_BACKEND in your environment always wins.

A keybind with an argument does nothing. Add -- before the target: qs ipc call -- settings show bar. Without it qs parses the argument as its own and refuses the call. Argument-free calls work either way.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. If you're reporting a bug, qs log output and your Hyprland version help a lot.

The mark

The logo is Lucida — the astronomical term for the brightest star in a constellation, sharing its Latin root (lux) with "Lucid". A broken orbit ring, a four-point star at the centre, and one companion dot outside the gap.

Its official colour is coral #FF7F50. In the shell itself the ring and the companion dot track your accent, so the mark on the dock launcher recolours with whatever palette you are running — but coral is the canonical brand colour, and what you see above.

assets/logo.svg is the mark on its dark plate; assets/logo-mark.svg is the bare coral mark for light and dark backgrounds alike. Both are drawn from the same 24×24 geometry as LucidaMark.qml.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Built on Quickshell. Colour generation by matugen. Design follows Material 3 Expressive.