dotfiles/docs/shell.md

The shell

blob-shell is one long-running Quickshell process hosting the bar, panels, notifications, lock screen, OSD, and both menus. Everything runs inside it as a plugin, so summoning a panel is an IPC call into a process that is already up.

Layout

shell/
  shell.qml            entry point
  Commons/             Style, Colors, Border, Util
  Ui/                  shared components
  services/            plugin registry, bar widget registry, app library
  plugins/
    bar/               the bar and its widgets
    menu/              both menus
    notifications/     daemon, popups, DND, history
    notification-center/
    agents/            Claude Code usage limits and token stats
    lock/  polkit/  osd/  background/  clipboard/  emojis/
    image-picker/  reminders/
    panels/            audio bluetooth clock disk-speedtest monitor network
                       power quick-settings speedtest sysmon weather wifiqr
    services/          battery idle media nightlight

First-party plugins are discovered under shell/plugins at a depth of two or three and are enabled without being listed anywhere. Third-party plugins live in ~/.config/blob/plugins/<id>/ and are enabled through shell.json.

Config

shell.json is the whole bar config. It hot-reloads on save, and dragging a bar widget rewrites ~/.config/blob/shell.json directly, so after rearranging by hand copy it back:

cp ~/.config/blob/shell.json shell.json

./install.sh --check reports the drift.

Defaults live at config/blob/shell.json. A valid user file replaces them entirely rather than merging.

Bar layout

Section	Widgets
left	blob.menu, blob.workspaces
center	blob.clock (anchored), blob.system-update
right	blob.tray, blob.agents, blob.bluetooth, blob.network, blob.audio, blob.monitor, blob.power, blob.notifications

blob.clock and blob.notifications are type: "command" modules, which is how they carry their own click actions: the clock opens quick settings on left click, the shell's calendar on middle, and the timezone picker on right; the bell opens the notification centre on left and toggles silencing on right. The bell runs blob-notification-bell every 3 seconds and turns into a crossed-out bell while notifications are silenced.

The centre module named by centerAnchor cannot be dragged out of the centre. Every other widget still reorders.

Agents

blob.agents is Omarchy's agents panel (quattro branch), trimmed to Claude Code. The panel shows the plan, a line per limit window (session, weekly, and any model-scoped weekly allowance as a tick on the weekly meter) with the time until it resets, and a rotating summary of local token stats: tokens this week and today, the most used model, the busiest day, and today's prompts and sessions. The exact percentage is on hover.

Input	Action
left click	open the panel
right click, Enter, the hero button	start Claude Code in a terminal
middle click, r	refresh
Tab	move to the neighboring bar panel

The icon turns urgent when a window reaches 90%. Records refresh every refreshIntervalSec (900 by default) and the limits again whenever the panel opens.

blob-agent-usage-claude builds the record. Limits come from Anthropic's OAuth usage endpoint with the token in ~/.claude/.credentials.json; token stats come from the transcripts in ~/.claude/projects, with stats-cache.json and history.jsonl as fallbacks. Scans and probes are cached in ~/.cache/blob/agent-usage. When the access token has lapsed, starting Claude Code refreshes it.

Calendar

The clock's calendar popup and the Quick Settings card share one component, CalendarView in shell/Ui, with its date math in Ui/CalendarModel.js.

• Today is filled with the accent color; days from the neighbouring months are dimmed.
• Clicking a day selects it, and the line under the grid gives its weekday, day of the year, and how far it is from today. Clicking a day from the previous or next month moves the view there.
• Clicking the month label opens a month picker; the chevrons then step whole years, and clicking a month jumps to it.
• The scroll wheel steps months, or years while the picker is open.

Keys in the clock popup:

Key	Action
arrows / hjkl	move the selected day (a week up or down), or the month cursor in the picker
[ ]	previous or next month
{ }	previous or next year
m	open or close the month picker
t	back to today
w	toggle the week start between Monday and Sunday
Enter	back to today, or pick the highlighted month
Esc	close the month picker, then the popup

Animated wallpapers

The background plugin draws a GIF wallpaper with AnimatedImage, so it moves however it was set: the wallpaper picker, blob wallpaper set, blob bg set, or a theme's own background. The transition into it shows the first frame, and the animation starts once the transition finishes. Per-monitor wallpapers from blob bg monitor animate the same way. awww is no longer needed; blob-wallpaper-set and blob-theme-menu still stop a leftover awww-daemon so it cannot paint over the shell.

Differences from upstream

This shell was forked from Omarchy 4.0.4 and is not tracked against it. The changes beyond renaming:

• tailscale, dropbox, and dev-gallery plugins removed. agents was removed too, then ported back from the quattro branch with only Claude Code.
• The Dictation bar indicator removed with voice typing.
• Persistent workspaces 1-9 instead of 1-5.
• Menu cards 440 wide instead of 300, with the Blob icon on the bar button.
• The lock screen carries branding/screensaver.txt, the time and date above the password field, and an AGS-style password field: square corners, a 2px border on the blue slot at half alpha going to solid accent once typing starts, and urgent on a failed attempt.
• quick-settings, sysmon, and notification-center are new, ported from the GTK widgets. See widgets.md.

None of these are clones or overrides. They are edits to first-party source, so there is no clone machinery and nothing to re-apply after an upstream release. The fork base is recorded in upstream.md.

Debugging

journalctl --user -t blob-shell -f
blob-shell-restart

A QML error in a service plugin means that service never loads. For the lock that leaves the machine unlockable rather than locked open, so test it with blob-shell lock lock before trusting a change to it.