nova-shell

A minimal Quickshell bar for niri, lovingly hallucinated by a statistical text blender. Every line of code in this repository was produced by a glorified autocomplete engine and has not been meaningfully reviewed by a human with a functioning brain.

Use at your own risk. The slop machine was very confident, which is exactly when you should be most suspicious.

"Features"

Bar with workspaces, window title, clock, tray, and a regrettable number of widgets grouped into color-coded sections with glowing borders, because subtlety is dead
Niri IPC integration — workspace indicator, focused window title with app icon, power menu with niri msg action quit. All event-driven, no polling
Interactive hover panels — volume (with per-app mixer and output device switcher), brightness (with slider), media (with album art, transport controls, progress bar). Hover to peek, click to expand, leave to dismiss. The OSD and tooltip in one, because having three separate UI patterns for the same information was too reasonable
Context menus for tray icons with submenu support, network chooser (known available WiFi/ethernet), bluetooth device manager (connect/disconnect, battery levels)
Privacy indicators — screenshare and microphone icons pulse red/green when PipeWire detects active video/audio capture streams. Finally, you'll know when your webcam is on, which is more than can be said for most laptop manufacturers
Per-module accent colors that change based on state, with animated transitions. Battery blinks when critical and sends desktop notifications, because the robot cares about your hardware more than you do
Audio visualizer on album art via cava — because the robot watched too many r/unixporn posts and couldn't help itself
Screen corner rounding — tiny overlay windows with quarter-circle masks, click-transparent, configurable via screenRadius. The gradient top border curves to match, because the robot has opinions about pixel alignment
Background overlay — clock and date rendered on the background layer, visible behind windows and in niri overview gaps. Always there, never in the way
Weather via wttrbar with configurable arguments and rich HTML tooltips
Power menu with lock, suspend, logout, reboot, shutdown
Event-driven updates for network, bluetooth, and power profiles via dbus-monitor/nmcli monitor — no more 5-second polling lag
Animated everything: flyout tooltips slide in/out, modules fade on visibility change, icons crossfade on state change, notification count pops. The bar is basically a screensaver at this point
Home Manager module with stylix integration, per-module config objects (enable/disable + module-specific settings like polling intervals, thresholds, brightness step), and a theme system that hot-reloads
treefmt + nixfmt for formatting, because even AI slop deserves consistent indentation

Installation

Add the flake input and import the Home Manager module. The robot did not test any of this on real hardware, but it was extremely confident while writing it, which is the next best thing.

# flake.nix
inputs = {
  nova-shell.url = "git+https://git.berlin.ccc.de/vinzenz/nova-shell";
  nova-shell.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
};

# home.nix
imports = [ inputs.nova-shell.homeModules.default ];

Configuration

Turning it on

programs.nova-shell.enable = true;

This installs the bar, the Symbols Nerd Font, and a systemd user service that starts with graphical-session.target. If you use stylix, colors and fonts are populated automatically — one fewer thing for the AI to have gotten wrong. If you do not use stylix, you get Catppuccin Mocha, because the robot has taste and it is purple.

Disabling modules

All modules are enabled by default, because the robot was optimistic about what hardware you own and what software you run. Set any to false to make them go away permanently, which will feel better than you expect.

Disabling weather also removes wttrbar from your packages, which is the one piece of genuine dependency management in this entire project and frankly more than it deserves.

programs.nova-shell.modules = {
  weather.enable     = false;  # also evicts wttrbar from your system
  bluetooth.enable   = false;  # for people whose computers have ethernet ports and opinions
  backlight.enable   = false;  # your desktop monitor does not have a backlight slider, probably
  battery.enable     = false;  # see above, but for power
  temperature.enable = false;  # what you don't measure can't alarm you
  disk.enable        = false;  # the number will only make you anxious
  power.enable       = false;  # if you enjoy living dangerously without a logout button

  # modules with extra config
  backlight.step = 2;                                  # brightness adjustment %
  weather.args   = [ "--nerd" "--location" "Berlin" ]; # wttrbar arguments
  temperature.warm = 55;                               # °C threshold for warm color
  temperature.hot  = 75;                               # °C threshold for hot color
  battery.warning  = 30;                               # % for warning notification
  battery.critical = 10;                               # % for critical blink + notification
  cpu.interval     = 2000;                             # polling interval in ms
};

Each module is an object with enable (default true) and optional extra settings. Full list: workspaces, tray, windowTitle, clock, notifications, mpris, volume, bluetooth, backlight, network, powerProfile, idleInhibitor, weather, temperature, cpu, memory, disk, battery, power.

Theme

Theme keys are merged on top of whatever stylix provides. You only need to specify what you want to override. Values are written to ~/.config/nova-shell/theme.json, which the bar watches for changes at runtime, so you can iterate on colors without restarting anything — a level of polish that frankly raises uncomfortable questions about the rest of it.

programs.nova-shell.theme = {
  barHeight  = 28;
  barOpacity = 0.85;
  barPadding = 10;
  barSpacing = 8;
  radius     = 6;
  fontSize   = 13;
  fontFamily = "JetBrains Mono";

  # override individual palette entries if stylix's choices personally offend you
  colors.base00 = "#1a1a2e";
  colors.base05 = "#e0e0f0";
};

Full list of theme keys and their defaults:

Key	Default	Controls
`colors.base00`–`base0F`	Catppuccin Mocha	Base16 palette
`fontFamily`	`"sans-serif"`	Bar text font
`iconFontFamily`	`"Symbols Nerd Font"`	Nerd font for icons
`fontSize`	`12`	Base font size (px)
`barHeight`	`32`	Bar height (px)
`barOpacity`	`0.9`	Bar and flyout background opacity
`barPadding`	`8`	Left/right bar content margin (px)
`barSpacing`	`12`	Gap between modules (px)
`moduleSpacing`	`4`	Icon-to-label gap within a module (px)
`radius`	`4`	Corner radius for flyouts and menus (px)
`screenRadius`	`15`	Screen corner rounding, 0 to disable (px)

Systemd service

Enabled by default, bound to graphical-session.target. To attach it to something more specific, or to disable it entirely because you have strong feelings about how your session starts:

programs.nova-shell.systemd = {
  enable = true;
  target = "niri.service";
};

Contributing

Sure, why not. It can't get much worse, and the GPL requires you to share your improvements anyway, so you might as well.

License

GPLv3. Yes, the AI slop is copylefted now. caelestia-dots/shell provided architectural inspiration, which the robot then faithfully mangled into this. If you improve it, the license requires you to share those improvements — a higher standard of accountability than the author has held themselves to.

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