Rime Shell
A frame, three notches, and everything that grows out of them.
Rime Shell is the desktop: the bar, the Dashboard, the panels, notifications, settings, the lock screen. Each surface has an origin on the screen, and it grows out of that place and folds back into it.
The frame
Left notch
The Rime mark, in your accent colour, opens the power menu. Beside it are workspace dots: only the ones that have windows, the focused one and any that need you, each with its number. On Rime Tiling, a small picture of how windows are arranged follows them; click it to choose Split, Main + stack, One at a time or Scrolling, each with a line on what it does.
Centre notch
The focused app's name, or music, a timer, a stopwatch or a recording as they become active. Volume and brightness levels appear here too. Click it for the Dashboard.
Right notch
Network, Bluetooth, VPN and hotspot when they're in use, volume, battery, the clock and the notification bell. Each opens its pane of the right-hand panel.
The edges
A thin frame runs down the sides and along the bottom, its corners concentric with window corners. Hover the right edge for volume and brightness; the bottom edge opens the wallpaper picker and, at the corner, the clipboard.
Dashboard
Six tabs across the top: Home, System, Agents, Tasks and Apps, and Settings at the end, which opens the settings window. Home has your profile, a calendar, a clock with timer, alarm and stopwatch, the media player, brightness and eleven quick settings.
- Super D opens Home; Alt Space opens Apps; Super Z opens Tasks.
- The width follows the page: 900 px for Home, 560 for Apps. Changing page while it is open reshapes it on a spring.
- System shows CPU, memory and integrated GPU gauges, network, the power profile and disks. Tasks is a board with To Do, Ongoing and Done.
Rime Search
One field over apps, files, settings, open windows, the clipboard, a calculator, commands, projects, agents, SSH hosts and packages. The field is focused from the first frame; results appear beneath it as one group, never row by row.
- Start with
=to calculate,>for commands,~/for files,installorsshfor packages and hosts. - Every result is marked safe, changes something, or destructive. Enter on anything that isn't safe opens a preview of the exact command first; running it takes Ctrl Enter.
- Only
?questions that aren't arithmetic leave the machine, to Wolfram|Alpha, and only with an App ID you provide.
One surface on the right
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, VPN, hotspot, audio, the notification centre and incoming toasts are panes of one surface under the right notch. Switching from Wi-Fi to notifications keeps it open: its width and depth retarget on a spring and the panes cross-fade.
- Panes: network 480 px wide, notifications 400, audio 200 (300 for the mixer).
- The notch itself never moves; the panel draws the band that joins them, in the same frame as its body.
- Super N notifications · Super Alt W Wi-Fi · Super A audio.
Notifications move like objects
A new notification arrives on top and the others make room. Dismiss one and the gap closes a beat later, so nothing lands on a card that is still leaving. Clear all lets them go from the bottom up.
- Drag a card sideways to dismiss it: past 40 % of its width, or flicked faster than 600 px/s. Otherwise it settles back.
- Toasts show one at a time for five seconds; the rest queue, and ones their app has already withdrawn are dropped.
- Do Not Disturb keeps notifications in the centre and stops toasts.
Settings, from the notch
The settings window — the Nexus — is a real window with sixteen pages in five groups. It extrudes from the centre notch: a broad neck comes down, swells into a flask and becomes the window, then the neck thins and draws back. Closing, the content goes first and the mass is drawn back up into the notch.
- Look & feel: Appearance, Layout & Behavior, Display.
- Input: Input, Keybinds.
- Privacy & agents: Privacy & Permissions, Firewall, Agents.
- Devices: Pair a device, Paired devices.
- System: Data & Storage, Closing the Lid, Gaming, Recovery, Blueprint, Misc.
- Open with Super C, or
rime shell nexus.
Lock and unlock
Locking takes a picture of the desktop first, then pours a notch-coloured shade down over it from the centre notch while the desktop sinks and darkens underneath. Unlocking runs the same thing backwards, frame for frame, and hands you the desktop exactly as you left it.
Each character you type adds a shape: a clover, an arrow, a pill, a soft burst, a diamond, a clamshell, a pentagon. The login screen uses the same code.
Only the length is used, as on the lock screen. Nothing you type leaves this field.
Every surface has an origin
Each kind of surface has a named motion family in the Shell's code, with its own geometry and timing (open / close, at the default speed).
Motion that holds at 60, 120 and 144 Hz
Surfaces run on springs, solved exactly for however much time passed since the last frame. A reversal keeps its velocity; nothing restarts from rest. Scrub through a real open of the Dashboard below.
- width
- 900
- depth
- 560
- shoulder
- 28
- corner
- 24
- edge bow
- 0
Computing the same open at 60 Hz and 144 Hz…
Reduce Motion keeps the meaning
With Reduce Motion on, nothing travels: surfaces appear as their finished shape and fade, and effects are held to 160 ms. The Dashboard still opens from the same place; it just doesn't grow.
Built to be used from the keyboard
Every surface can be opened, used and closed from the keyboard, and focus rings appear only when you are using the keyboard, not after a click. Text colours are checked against each surface they sit on: body text aims for 7:1, secondary text 4.5:1.
- Motion speed is a setting (Snappy, Balanced, Relaxed, or a custom scale), and Reduce Motion applies to window animations too.
- The lock screen announces errors and Caps Lock to screen readers.
- Rime Shell runs on Hyprland, niri and labwc.
Rime Shell began as a fork of Brain_Shell by Brainitech, used under the MIT licence. Source on GitHub.