Lucid v1.20 — Lucid 2

Lucid 2. Every surface is redrawn in Material You Expressive on one shared kit
of controls, the clock grows into an app, the launcher learns new modes and the
control centre's tiles are yours to arrange. On top of that sits a release's
worth of new features, most of them from Ciro Rivera, who wrote twenty-five
of the pull requests in this one. Thank you, Ciro.

Lucid 2

• What's new, in the shell. The first start after an update opens a sheet
  with what the new version brings, once; Settings → About → What's new
  opens it again, and qs ipc call updates whatsnew too. A newer release
  waiting to be installed still links its notes on GitHub from the same card.
• Material You Expressive, everywhere. The bar, dock, launcher, control
  centre, clock, widgets, OSD, toasts, lock screen and settings now share one
  kit of controls (lucidui/): buttons, chips, sliders, switches, tabs, text
  fields, list items, loading indicators and the expressive shapes. Icons are
  Material Symbols drawn from Google's own paths, multisampled so they stay
  clean at the smallest sizes, and text is set in Google Sans Flex, bundled
  under its OFL licence.
• Interface size. Settings → General → Size scales the whole shell at
  once, from 75 to 125 %: the bar, dock, panels, menus, desktop widgets and the
  text in them. Apps and the monitor's own scale are left as they are. Widgets
  keep their place against the edge or corner they sit nearest, and the new
  size applies when the slider is let go.
• Progress waves. Timers, the stopwatch, the media disc and the session
  screen draw their rings the M3 Expressive way: the active arc waves, the track
  stays still.
• A session screen. SUPER+Escape opens lock, suspend, log out, restart and
  shut down in one full-screen sheet. The three that end the session need a
  second press within four seconds.
• A window switcher. CTRL+ALT+TAB lays out every open window on every
  workspace, the special ones included, newest first and with live previews.
  As on Windows it stays up once the keys are let go: Tab or the arrows move,
  Enter switches, Delete closes the window and Esc backs out. CTRL+ALT+TAB
  again steps on; with SHIFT it steps back.
• Password beads. On the lock screen, in the polkit prompt and on the login
  screen, each character typed drops a Material Expressive shape that melts
  into a dot. A selection gathers its beads into one band, and Ctrl+A sweeps it
  across from the left. The shapes are androidx's own MaterialShapes, worked
  out from the same numbers rather than drawn by eye.
• The lock screen grows out of your desktop. Locking takes a picture of
  each display first, so the lock starts as exactly what was on screen, which
  frosts, sinks into a card and gives way to the wallpaper. Unlocking runs it
  back: the cards fall away, the desktop rises through the frost, and the last
  moments fade straight onto your live windows.
• Workspaces as shapes. The workspace pill's resting look: an empty
  workspace is a dot, one with windows a square, the one you are on a new
  Material shape on each visit, and neighbouring busy workspaces join into one
  run. The pill stretches from one to the next, and the marks under it take its
  ink exactly. Hovering still brings the numbers.
• The clock is an app. Behind the pill: Today, with the weather and what is
  next; a month calendar with reminders; countdown timers and a pomodoro; a
  stopwatch with laps; and world clocks. Whatever is counting shows on the pill
  as a chip with a ring, and the timers are shared with the Timer widget and the
  control centre's Timer tile.
• The pomodoro has options of its own. The tune button on its card opens
  them in place: four presets (25 / 5, 50 / 10, 15 / 3, 90 / 20), a stepper for
  each length and for the rounds, and a daily goal the card counts toward.
  Breaks and focus sessions can each start by themselves or wait for you, a set
  can stop after its long break instead of repeating, and do-not-disturb can be
  held for as long as a focus session runs. A phase in hand takes another
  minute from the card, or any number over IPC (timer pomodoroAdd, beside
  pomodoroSkip and pomodoroStop). The same options sit under Pomodoro
  on Settings' Date & Time page.
• Every widget is rebuilt, and four new ones join them: Timer, At a Glance,
  Photo and Fetch. A widget's right-click menu is a new sheet with live previews
  of its looks.
• A widget panel. Right-click the desktop and choose Widget Panel, or pick
  Widgets in the launcher's mode bar: a sheet slides in with every widget drawn
  live. Drag one straight out to where it should sit — it snaps like any card —
  or click it into the first free spot. It searches by name or by what a widget
  does, lists what is already out (hover to find a card, click for its sheet,
  lock or remove it) and switches layouts. While it is open the cards come up
  over your windows with a − on each, and a card dragged onto the sheet is
  taken off. qs ipc call widgets panel toggles it.
• The launcher gains a head band with its modes, the calculator's answer as
  a card at the top of the results, and prefixes: ? for the web, $ to run a
  command in your terminal and : for emoji. Apps can be hidden from it, and it
  has a page of its own in Settings.
• Control centre tiles are yours to arrange. Edit tiles lets you drag
  them into any order and add or remove them from a shelf of spares; the
  sliders ease as they move.
• Switching wallpaper no longer stalls the desktop. The colours are worked
  out at low priority, one run at a time with the newest request winning, and
  the shell crossfades its own palette alongside the picture. Browsing the
  wallpaper strip works out colours only for the picture you stop on, and
  kitty, VSCodium, Discord, Spotify, Steam, GTK and the login screen follow
  once, a few seconds later. The strip opens from small cached copies rather
  than decoding every original, 8K ones included, each time.
• Window borders follow the palette, and the starship prompt takes the
  palette's colours without its format being replaced.
• A Storage page. Settings → Storage shows what fills each drive, by kind
  and as 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) with a confirm for each, and the drives themselves with their
  health. It warns when space runs low and can empty trash after a number of
  days. The bar's disk card and the System widget now count free space as df
  does, leaving the root reserve out.

Sounds

• Lucid has sounds of its own. The freedesktop bells and drops are gone;
  every sound is synthesised — FM bells, plucks, blips and sweeps, nothing
  recorded — by support/sounds/build-sounds.py, all in one key and levelled
  to one loudness, so a volume you set means the same thing for each.
• Eight notification sounds: Glint, Pulse, Chime, Tap, Orbit, Halo, Beacon
  and Alert, picked from chips that play as you choose. A saved freedesktop
  choice carries over to its nearest match.
• System sounds for a USB or Bluetooth device connecting and leaving, the
  charger going in and out, a full charge, low and critical battery, the camera
  turning on and off, and a screenshot. Settings → Sound → System sounds has
  a switch and a play button for each, and one volume for all of them. They
  keep quiet while you are silenced, apart from the battery warnings. The timer
  and pomodoro alarm is new as well, and reminders ring out loud now —
  they used to arrive in silence — with a switch and a play button for each
  under Settings → Date & Time → Timers.
• Tiny ticks for your own keys: volume and brightness tick at the level
  just set — where a drag or a held key starts and where it stops, not at every
  step — and Caps Lock and the microphone answer on and off. Dimming while you
  are away stays quiet. They start from Kenney's Interface
  Sounds (CC0).
• A toast for USB devices, named and drawn as what they are — a phone, a
  mouse, a drive. The laptop's own built-in parts stay quiet, a hub full of
  devices is one toast, and a device that drops and comes straight back is not
  news.
• Camera on and camera off, with the app using it, the way Windows 11 says
  so. Nothing polls for it: the camera's device is watched for being opened and
  closed. With the Privacy module on the bar, its own camera toast folds into
  the same pill.
• qs ipc call -- sounds play <name> plays any of them; sounds list names
  them all.

From Ciro Rivera

Ciro wrote everything in this section, and a good deal of 1.10.5 besides. The
pull requests arrived tested, explained and ready, and the shell is better in
places nobody had asked about yet. A huge thank you, @ciroenrique4-eng.

Settings

• Search every setting. A field at the head of the settings rail searches
  every row on every page, not just the page names: the results say which card
  a row sits in, and opening one scrolls to the row and flashes it. Ctrl+F
  focuses the field, typing anywhere starts a search, and
  qs ipc call -- settings search <words> opens Settings with the search typed.
  It replaces the rail's filter. By Ciro Rivera in #34.
• A Windows page for Hyprland. Gaps, border width and colour (none, the
  accent, or a gradient through the palette, which follows the theme), corners
  and their shape, shadow, dimming; the tiling layout with each layout's own
  options and a live preview; and focus, the cursor, resizing, snapping and
  animations. Only what you change belongs to Lucid, it applies without a
  reload, each row's reset hands the option back to your own config, and a file
  of yours required after Lucid's still wins, with the row saying so. By Ciro
  Rivera in #46.
• An Input page for Hyprland. Keyboard layouts in order, picked from every
  layout and variant the system knows; the key that switches them; what Caps
  Lock does; key repeat and Num Lock. Mouse speed, acceleration, scrolling and
  left-handed buttons; the touchpad's tapping, scrolling and palm rejection; and
  how the workspace swipe feels. By Ciro Rivera in #47.
• Corner rounding. One dial under Settings → General → Shape, from square
  to half as round again as shipped, live: cards, panels, menus, the bar's and
  the dock's pills, buttons, chips, switches and the search fields all follow
  it, while avatars, dots and the like stay round. By Ciro Rivera in #18.

Colours and palettes

• Templates follow every palette. The matugen templates that carry the
  palette into other applications (Hyprland, Zen, rofi, waybar, pywalfox and
  your own) used to follow only the wallpaper; the fixed themes and pywal reach
  them too now. They render one at a time, so one broken template no longer
  breaks the others, and what happened to each is recorded, with a toast naming
  any that failed. By Ciro Rivera in #36.
• A Colours page. Matugen's scheme style (nine of them, from Tonal to
  Monochrome), its contrast, and which of the wallpaper's dominant colours the
  palette starts from. Your colour is a new theme built from a single colour,
  typed as hex, picked off the screen or chosen from a few. Below that, every app
  template with how its last render went, a switch for each, the apps that are
  installed but not wired up yet, and a form for a template of your own that you
  can try before adding. By Ciro Rivera in #38.
• A Palettes page. A gallery of the 560 base16 and base24 schemes
  tinted-theming collects, drawn in their own colours, searchable and filtered
  by dark or light, one click to add or use. Themes import from a repo or a
  file, light schemes are finally kept light (with a dark side worked out for
  them), and the palette on screen can be edited live and exported as a Lucid
  palette or base16 YAML. By Ciro Rivera in #40.

Bar

• Arrange the bar from Settings. Settings → Bar → Modules shows the bar's
  three groups as lanes: drag a module along its lane or into another one, or
  use the arrow keys. Each module has a card with its switch, the group it sits
  in and a way to the rest of its settings, and a right click on a module in the
  bar opens its card. By Ciro Rivera in #44 and #50.
• Three new modules, all off until you switch them on. Privacy appears
  only while something uses the microphone, the camera or the screen, says which
  app, and can raise a toast as it starts. Power holds lock, suspend,
  hibernate, log out, restart and shut down, in the order you pick, under the
  machine's uptime. Active window shows the focused window and, opened,
  floats, pins, fullscreens, moves or closes it, or switches to another window
  on the workspace. By Ciro Rivera in #50.
• Looks and options for the bar's own modules, each on its card, every one
  starting from how the module already looks. The clock: one line or two lines
  beside the accent chip, and four ways to write the date. Media: a still cover
  or just the bars and the play button, a large-cover panel, and switches to
  hide it while nothing plays, drop the artist, cap the title's width, hide the
  play button and turn the volume wheel off. Workspaces: numbers instead of
  dots, how many always show, and the wheel on or off — the wheel switches
  workspaces now, which it never did. Notifications: a dot, or bell and count on
  an accent chip. The tray: every app's icon in the bar, the icons in the
  palette's colours, and a switch per app to keep it out. By Ciro Rivera in #50.
• A bar on every display. Settings → Displays → The bar on its own →
  Every display (or qs ipc call -- displays bar all) gives each screen a bar
  of its own, with that screen's workspaces. Notification popups, the privacy
  toast and the bar's ipc still come from one of them: the shell's display, or
  the one you are on. By Ciro Rivera in #14.

Launcher

• One search for everything open and everything to do. Typed text now
  finds open windows by their app or their title (Return switches to it), apps'
  own actions like New Private Window (listed under the app when you type its
  name), and lock, suspend, log out, restart and shut down from three letters,
  ranked together with the apps and the commands. Restart, shut down and log out
  ask for a second Return. A typed address gets a row of its own at the top when
  nothing matches it better. Each has a switch under Settings → Launcher,
  beside a line under each app from its desktop entry (off to begin with). By
  Ciro Rivera in #17.
• Power buttons by the search field, off to begin with: pick which of lock,
  suspend, log out, restart and shut down show while nothing is typed. The ones
  that end the session turn red on the first press and act on the second. By
  Ciro Rivera in #17.

Sound and the phone

• The Sound page shows what a device is doing. A live level meter under the
  output and the microphone volume (so a dead microphone reads apart from a
  quiet one), balance for a stereo output with a way back to the centre, a
  Left/Right test, an app put 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 a device goes away, headset call mode and
  mono audio. The meters have a switch of their own. By Ciro Rivera in #11.
• The phone widget browses the phone's files (with a switch for the
  button), greys out what the phone has switched off and says why when tapped,
  says what an action just did, and with more than one phone paired steps to the
  next and remembers it. By Ciro Rivera in #15.

Control centre

• Night light. hyprsunset warms the screen, fading in and out, by hand, from
  sunset to sunrise where you are (worked out locally, with no network) or
  between hours you set. Switching it while a schedule runs holds until the
  schedule next changes. Add the Night light tile with Edit tiles;
  right-click it for the warmth and the schedule. Settings → Displays and
  qs ipc call nightlight reach it too. By Ciro Rivera in #53.
• The disk card counts LVM and LUKS volumes. A root on LVM read as
  0 / 477 GB; volumes now count toward the disk they live on, and a btrfs
  partition with several subvolumes mounted is counted once rather than once
  per subvolume. By Ciro Rivera in #27.

Screenshots and recording

• A preview card after each capture, in the corner of the display you
  captured: click to open, drag it into any app that takes files, or copy, mark
  up, show in its folder or delete (twice) from its buttons. Recordings get one
  too, with their length. Settings → General → Screenshots picks the card, the
  old notification or nothing. Screenshots also save about three times faster.
  By Ciro Rivera in #52.

Network, workspaces and the clipboard

• Share a Wi-Fi network as a QR code, from its row in Settings → Network or
  the bar's Wi-Fi panel, the way phones do it. The password shows on request and
  copies without landing in the clipboard history. By Ciro Rivera in #51.
• Special workspaces can blur what is behind them, keep a margin from the
  screen's edges so they sit like a card, and be made by you: a name, a mark,
  the apps it brings up and a key of its own. By Ciro Rivera in #45.
• The clipboard history has a preview pane: an image at full size, text in
  full, a colour as a large swatch. Entries are sorted into images, colours,
  links, addresses and text, and Ctrl+Shift+Del twice clears the lot. By Ciro
  Rivera in #10.

Fixed

• The charger and low-battery toasts never fired, and the Preview button
  under Notifications → System events did nothing. By Ciro Rivera in #25.
• Log out did nothing on a Lua config, from the session screen, the lock
  screen or SUPER+M: hyprctl dispatch exit is not a dispatcher there. It tries
  hl.dsp.exit() first now. By Ciro Rivera in #30.
• The bar clock's AM/PM is the locale's own now ("P.M.", "午後"). Ciro found
  it doubled outside English locales in #29.
• Bluetooth devices that drop two seconds after connecting, over and over:
  an adapter that is not pairable lets the pairing through but throws its key
  away. Pairing now holds pairable on until it is done. By Ciro Rivera in #9.
• A region or a recording on a second display came from the wrong place, or
  recorded both displays. By Ciro Rivera in #8.
• The installer offered to restart a shell that was not running, and did,
  with plain qs. By Ciro Rivera in #7.

Contributed

• Workspaces that say which display they are on. With two or more displays
  the bar's dots fall into one run per display, each led by the display's number
  on hover, the accent follows the display you are on, and the overview lays out
  one block per display. Settings → Displays → Workspaces → Group by display
  turns it off; one display looks as it always did. By @MrZtone in #54.
• The installer names what a replaced hyprland.conf sourced, since a Lua
  config cannot read those files, and the README gives the xray layer rule in
  Lua. By @arbelonson-source in #5.

Performance

• About 150 MB less memory at rest (790 to 639 MB resident on an Iris Xe
  laptop). The bundled font keeps only the three axes the shell varies, 4.15 MB
  down to 569 KB; the launcher, the settings window and the emoji picker are
  built the first time they are used rather than at start-up; and an unused
  NVIDIA driver is no longer loaded on a machine without an NVIDIA card.
• The bar no longer redraws at 60 fps on an idle desktop. Every looping
  animation in it now stops while it cannot be seen. Thanks to
  @theheavenlyhacker, whose measurements in #43 showed what it was costing.
• Hyprland no longer freezes for five seconds while a window resizes. The
  OSD asked Hyprland for the lock keys; it reads the keyboard's own LEDs now.

Installer

• New packages: hyprsunset (night light), qrencode (Wi-Fi codes),
  xdg-terminal-exec (the launcher's $ mode), inotify-tools (the camera
  on/off toast), sshfs (browsing a phone's files), pipewire-audio with
  sound-theme-freedesktop (the Sound page's Left/Right test), and
  smartmontools and udisks2 (drive health and mounting on the Storage page).
• Google Sans Flex is installed to ~/.local/share/fonts/lucid for the apps
  the Environment page dresses, and beside the SDDM theme, which now draws in it
  the way the lock screen does.
• Hyprland: modules/settings.lua applies what the Windows and Input pages
  set, and modules/plugins.lua holds plugin settings, each applying only while
  its plugin is loaded. It ships with the tilting cursor of
  hypr-dynamic-cursors; the
  installer offers to build it (--no-plugins skips that) with
  scripts/cursor-plugin.sh, against the headers the hyprland package installs
  and without root. modules/autostart.lua runs the same script on every login,
  so the cursor is still there after a restart, and is rebuilt by itself after a
  Hyprland update.
• The theme scripts behind the Colours and Palettes pages go into
  ~/.config/lucid with the rest.
• The login screen wears whoever is picked. Each account paints its own
  wallpaper and palette into the SDDM theme, and choosing another account in
  the user picker crossfades the greeter to theirs. Before, the installer handed
  the whole theme to whichever account ran it last, and every other account's
  wallpaper changes were dropped without a word. The theme now stays root's,
  with one sticky users/ directory each account writes only its own part of,
  and an account the greeter has nothing for yet is painted at its next login.
• Settings' file choosers no longer need zenity. Picking an account
  picture, a wallpaper, a template or a palette did nothing at all without it.
  They now open the desktop's own chooser through the XDG portal, with zenity
  and kdialog as fallbacks and a notification when none is there, and they float
  instead of tiling.
• Restarting the shell at the end of an install goes through launch-shell.sh,
  as a login does, so it comes up on the same render backend.
• SUPER+R restarts the shell as well, as its keybind always said: Hyprland
  reloads, the shell stops cleanly and comes back through launch-shell.sh.
  The calculator (F12) opens as a small floating window rather than tiling,
  and with more than one keyboard layout Alt+Shift switches between them
  (Settings → Input picks another key).

Upgrading

git pull
./install.sh

• Your bar keeps its layout. The six module switches from 1.10.5 carry over,
  and every module stays in the group it was in until you move it.
• Your keybinds are yours: the installer only seeds keybinds.json when it
  is missing, so three shipped changes need adding by hand under Settings →
  Keybinds. SUPER+Escape opens the session screen (qs ipc call session toggle), CTRL+ALT+TAB opens the window switcher (qs ipc call switcher next, and qs ipc call switcher prev on CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+TAB), and SUPER+M
  should run
  command -v hyprshutdown >/dev/null 2>&1 && hyprshutdown || hyprctl dispatch 'hl.dsp.exit()'.
• A Hyprland config of your own gets require("modules.settings")
  appended, the same way modules.glass is, so the Windows and Input pages can
  apply what they set.
• The login screen needs the theme reinstalled once, as root, to move to
  per-account copies: ./install.sh does it and paints your own account
  straight away, or on its own sudo support/sddm/install-theme.sh. Any other
  account that uses Lucid needs ./install.sh run once as itself too, since
  an older sync-sddm.sh cannot write to the new theme. Each account then
  shows up as itself after its next login or wallpaper change.