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Edit Mode
Edit Mode is a layout editor for the whole desktop: press Super + Shift + E (or right-click the wallpaper → Edit layout) and the screen you're on shrinks into a card with a drawer beside it. While it's open you drag things instead of using them — desktop widgets, bar widgets, dock icons and even the lock screen's islands — and every change lands in the same config file the settings pages write, so nothing here is a separate "layout" you have to keep in sync.
Leave with Escape, the same shortcut, or the Done button. Escape steps back one thing at a time: it first cancels a drag in flight, then closes a menu, then closes the drawer, and only then leaves the mode.
| Surface | How |
|---|---|
| Desktop widgets | Drag to move (grid + snap guides as usual). Right-click a widget for Pin, Size (with Reset size once it has been resized), Duplicate, its lock-screen behaviour, and Remove. Add new ones from the drawer's Widgets section — drop them where you want, or click to place at a default spot; a widget can be placed more than once. Drop a widget onto the drawer to remove it. With a selection, Delete removes it and Ctrl + D duplicates it. |
| Bar | Every bar widget becomes a handle. Drag within a list or across the three of them (left, center, right); a bar shows where it'll land. Right-click for Center this (center list only) and Remove. Add from the drawer's Bar section — drag a widget straight onto the bar, or open it and pick a group. The Bar chip on the toolbar opens the bar's appearance page (position, height, corners, background). |
| Dock | Drag icons to reorder pinned apps; drop one on the drawer to unpin. Add pinned apps from the drawer's Dock section. The Dock chip on the toolbar opens the dock's appearance page; right-clicking the dock's own body, or an icon, offers Edit dock, which opens the mode on that page. |
| Style | The Style chip (or right-click the wallpaper → Wallpaper & style) opens the wallpaper, the theme and the colour scheme: the folder as a grid of thumbnails (click applies, the card follows), Light / Dark, the same swatch grid Settings draws, and the separate lock-screen and light-mode wallpapers, each with a row that opens the folder for that wallpaper directly. On the Lockscreen tab with a separate lock wallpaper on, the card's picks land on the lock's wallpaper. Browse all wallpapers and All colour settings hand off to the selector and to Settings, which means leaving the mode. |
| Presets | At the top of Style: Save the current look stores everything on the card as a preset (same folder and script as Settings' Preset Manager); the strip shows the saved ones with their wallpapers, the applied one marked. Clicking one shows the same review Settings does — what it was made for, what in it reads like a command — then Apply. Undo preset brings back the settings from before the last one. Browse the store hands off to Settings' Store tab and says how many installed presets have an update. |
| Lock screen | Switch the tab above the card to Lockscreen. The card renders your real lock screen — wallpaper treatment, blur, islands and the lock palette — without starting any authentication. Widgets moved here keep a lock-only position; the drawer's Lock screen section toggles which islands show and which widgets appear on the lock. Drag the icons inside an island to reorder it (the password field stays put). Use desktop layout forgets the lock-only positions. |
Right-clicking an empty stretch of the bar, the dock or the wallpaper opens a small menu, in and out of the mode. Its first row goes straight into the mode with the drawer already open on whatever you clicked — Desktop widgets from the wallpaper, Bar widgets from the bar, Edit dock from the dock — and clicking it again while the mode is on just swaps the drawer to the other catalogue. Under it sit Edit layout / Done editing and Settings; the wallpaper's menu also offers Wallpaper & style, which opens the mode on the Style catalogue. On a touch screen, a long press on the wallpaper opens the mode too.
The toolbar above the card carries the same catalogues as chips — Widgets · Bar · Dock · Style (on the Lockscreen tab: Widgets · Lock screen · Style) — so a click opens the drawer on that one and a second click closes it. Each catalogue's root also offers the shell's defaults back as one undo step: Remove every widget, Reset the bar's layout, Reset the dock, Reset the islands.
Ctrl + Z / Ctrl + Shift + Z (or the toolbar arrows) walk back through everything done in the current session of the mode — moves, adds, removes, reorders, island toggles, and the Style catalogue's picks (a wallpaper, the theme, a scheme are each one step; undoing a wallpaper reruns the colour pipeline, so it takes a second). Applying a preset replaces the whole config at once, which is more than one step can hold: the history is cleared and Undo preset stands in for it. The history is dropped when you leave the mode; what's on disk at that point is the layout.
The mode edits the monitor that had focus when you opened it (or the one you right-clicked). Other screens keep their desktops at full size and are untouched. With more than one screen the toolbar names the one being edited; click it to move the mode to the next screen.
Everything the mode animates — the card shrinking, the drawer, menus, drop indicators — follows the shell's animation tiers, so Appearance → Reduced motion and the animation speed setting apply to it exactly as they do to the rest of the shell.
All of it is plain config in ~/.config/illogical-impulse/config.json, the same keys the settings pages use:
| Key | What |
|---|---|
background.activeWidgets |
desktop widgets, their positions, lock behaviour and lock-only positions |
background.widgets.enableSnap |
the snap toggle in the toolbar |
bar.layouts.{left,center,right} |
the bar lists |
dock.order, dock.pinnedApps
|
the dock |
lock.islands.{main,left,right} |
island draw order — leave a key out (or empty) to get the default order; unknown ids are ignored but kept |
lock.nowPlaying, lock.sports, lock.showAlarm, lock.showWeather, lock.showLockedText, lock.security.fingerprint.showIndicator
|
the island toggles |
background.wallpaperPath, background.lockscreenWallpaperPath, background.lightModeWallpaperPath, background.useSeparateLockscreenWallpaper, background.useSeparateLightModeWallpaper, appearance.palette.type
|
what the Style catalogue changes — through the same wallpaper service and switch script the selector and Settings use |
~/.config/illogical-impulse/presets/ |
the presets, one JSON per look, exactly as the Preset Manager keeps them |
An older shell reading a config written by the mode just ignores the keys it doesn't know; nothing else is rewritten.
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Nothing happens on Super + Shift + E — the bind lives in the Hyprland keybinds; if you've overridden it in
~/.config/hypr/custom/, use the wallpaper right-click menu instead, or bind thequickshell:editModeToggleglobal shortcut to another key. - The lock preview looks different from the real lock — the preview uses the same surface and config, but not the live session (no media, no real fingerprint state). Layout and order are exact; content is placeholder.
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Contract tests (for contributors):
python3 -m unittest discover -s scripts/tests -p 'test_edit_mode_*.py'plustest_lock_preview_contract.pyandtest_lock_islands_contract.pypin the mode's write scope, the preview's isolation from PAM and the island defaults.