Infinidesk

An infinite spatial canvas, for your desktop.

Why Infinidesk?

The modern PC desktop can feel claustrophobic - creative and developer workflows frequently demand access to many apps and tabs at once, resulting in a frantic mess of alt-tabbing through piles of overlapping panes. The position and order of your windows keeps changing - which is difficult to keep track of and creates friction in your workflow. This problem is especially bad on the confines of a laptop screen, where screen space is particularly scarce.

Infinidesk is a new, spatially-oriented way to navigate your desktop. Drawing inspiration from digital whiteboard apps, windows are positioned on an infinite canvas, breaking the bounds of your screen borders. This takes advantage of our intuitive spatial awareness instead of fighting it, well-proven as the most popular digital note-taking method.

Key features

• Wayland-native: Supports the latest and greatest apps right out of the box.
• Touchpad gesture support: Zoom across the canvas with 2-finger pan!
• Fast navigation: Use alt+tab to rapidly warp between windows.
• Freeform zoom: Zoom in to fine app details, or out to show more windows!
• Shell layering: Run a wallpaper daemon on the bottom layer, or render a taskbar over the top.
• Built-in annotations: Draw and markup in and around your windows with a built-in pen tool!

Implementation

Infinidesk is written in pure C, making use of the wlroots Wayland compositor library/framework for the really low-level stuff (damage tracking, user input registration, low-level graphics).

Wayland clients (apps) can attempt to call a range of different protocol functions for different functionality (e.g. layering, or input device capture). A range of different protocols were implemented, with src/layer_shell.c being a good example of an implementation of the wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1 protocol.

The PangoCairo text rendering library is used for rendering fonts in e.g. the alt-tab switcher.

Claude 4.5 Opus was used via OpenCode and Claude Code for scaffolding and debugging the project.

Building and running

To ensure deterministic and reliable builds, a Nix flake is used to build and run Infinidesk. Nix is also the easiest way to build and run this project.

To build Infinidesk:

nix build
# Executable in ./result/bin/infinidesk

To directly run:

nix run