quickshell-sidebar

A slide-in control centre for Hyprland, built with Quickshell, plus the menu overlay, launcher, lock screen and notification daemon its tiles drive.

Press Super+A and a panel slides in from the right edge of the focused monitor:

• Quick settings: a grid of tiles. Toggles (night light, idle lock, HDR, mute) fill with the accent colour while they're on, and read their state back from the same command a keybinding would run, so the tile and the CLI never disagree. Actions (audio devices, Bluetooth, clipboard, wallpaper, theme, windows, display, capture, apps, lock, power) do the thing and get out of the way.
• Media: now playing, with transport controls, for any MPRIS player.
• Weather: current conditions and the next four days from Open-Meteo. No API key.
• Notifications: history, with clear-all.

The lock screen shows the clock over weather, the liturgical day and a calendar. The church widget comes from typikon: today's feast, season, rank and fast, and the week ahead, for twenty Orthodox jurisdictions and four Byzantine Catholic churches.

Click anywhere else, or press Super+A again, and it slides back out.

How it fits together

Everything the UI does is a plain mw-* command, and every mw-* command reaches the shell through Quickshell's IPC:

Super+A ──► mw-sidebar ──► qs -c mw ipc call sidebar toggle ──► Sidebar.qml
tile    ──► mw-nightlight toggle / mw-menu toggle capture / …

So anything you can click, you can also script:

mw-sidebar                          # toggle the sidebar
mw-menu toggle system               # open a menu
mw-menu routes                      # list every menu
printf 'a\tApple\nb\tBanana\n' | mw-menu pick Fruit    # blocking picker, prints the choice
mw-weather --text
qs -c mw ipc show                   # every IPC target and function

Path	What it is
shell.qml	Entry point
Config.qml	Every tunable: font, radius, clock formats, idle timers, lock screen widgets
Ipc.qml	The IPC surface the mw-* commands call
modules/Sidebar.qml	The panel itself: a layer-shell window anchored top, bottom and right
modules/sidebar/	One file per card. Adding a card is a file here and a line in Sidebar.qml
modules/Overlay.qml	Menus, app launcher, and the blocking pickers mw-menu exposes
services/Routes.qml	The menu tree. Every entry is an argv, so adding one is one line
modules/Lock.qml	WlSessionLock lock screen, PAM-backed
modules/Idle.qml	Idle lock and monitor blanking, in-process
modules/Notifications.qml	Notification daemon
modules/Osd.qml	Volume and brightness OSD
modules/Background.qml	Wallpaper
bin/	The mw-* commands
themes/	Colour schemes. The shell reads ~/.config/mw-theme/colors.json

Requirements

• Hyprland 0.56 or later with the Lua config. The scripts dispatch with hyprctl dispatch "hl.dsp.…", which the older hyprlang parser doesn't accept.
• Quickshell 0.3 or later
• A Nerd Font. JetBrainsMono Nerd Font by default; change it in Config.qml.
• jq, python3, curl, libnotify (notify-send)

For the tiles and menus, install what you use:

Feature	Needs
Volume, mute, audio devices	pamixer, pactl (PipeWire or PulseAudio)
Night light	hyprsunset
Clipboard history	cliphist, wl-clipboard
Capture	grim, slurp, satty, hyprpicker, gpu-screen-recorder, tesseract (OCR)
Church widget	typikon: cargo install --git https://git.pumpin.online/funkpower/typikon
Monitor brightness	ddcutil, the i2c-dev module, and membership of the i2c group
Bluetooth, mixer, Wi-Fi tiles	ghostty running bluetui, wiremix, impala

Anything missing just makes its tile do nothing. The rest keep working.

Install

git clone https://git.pumpin.online/funkpower/quickshell-sidebar ~/.config/quickshell/mw

# The commands on PATH
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s ~/.config/quickshell/mw/bin/mw-* ~/.local/bin/

# A theme
ln -sfn ~/.config/quickshell/mw/themes/gruvbox ~/.config/mw-theme

It has to live at ~/.config/quickshell/mw, because the commands address it as qs -c mw.

Only one notification daemon can run at a time, so stop mako, dunst or swaync first. Then start the shell and bind the key. In hyprland.lua:

hl.on("hyprland.start", function()
    hl.exec_cmd("qs -c mw")
    hl.exec_cmd("wl-paste --watch cliphist store")   -- clipboard history
end)

hl.bind("SUPER + A", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("mw-sidebar"))
hl.bind("SUPER + SPACE", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("mw-menu toggle apps"))

Wallpapers are read from ~/Pictures/Wallpapers (or Wallpaper), or from $MW_WALLPAPER_DIR. Weather finds your location by IP. If that guesses wrong, which it often does on a VPN, set it yourself:

mw-weather --set-location "Chicago, Illinois"

Customising

• Tiles: edit the model in modules/sidebar/TogglesCard.qml. A tile with a state: field is a toggle and reads that property from services/Toggles.qml; one without it is an action.
• Menus: services/Routes.qml.
• Colours: copy a directory under themes/, edit its colors.json, then run mw-theme set <name>.
• HDR: the HDR tile acts on the focused monitor. Set MW_HDR_OUTPUT=DP-1 (for example) to pin it to one output.
• Units: MW_WEATHER_UNITS=celsius and MW_WEATHER_WIND=kmh.
• Church calendar: set churchJurisdiction in Config.qml (see typikon --list), or leave it empty and run typikon --set-default <jurisdiction>. churchTypikonFast shows the Typikon's full fasting discipline.
• Lock and unlock hooks: lockHooks and unlockHooks in Config.qml, each a list of commands run in order, such as ["playerctl", "pause"] on lock.
• Idle timers and lock screen widgets: Config.qml.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.