no.de (A nodejs X11 Desktop Environment)

Background

What? This (eventually) will/may become a full desktop environment for a Linux machine written in javascript. It is based on X11 (no wayland, sorry). It will/may include the following DE elements:

• Login/Session
• Tiling window management
• Desktop
• Application launching
• Screen locking

Why? I don't really have a great answer for that. Maybe because I know javascript and wanted to have control of the "graphical" parts of my OS.

Concepts/Packages

• ipc

Inter-process communication is handled via WebSockets. Clients are created with scopes they are interested in. A central server reacts to messages and routes them to appropriate clients based on the scope of the message.

• cli

Command line interface is tool that is used to manage startup. It also serves as a way to initiate ipc calls in bash/zsh.

• hkd

Hot-key daemon is handled by sxhkd (the package bspwm uses) to configure keybindings. This can be used in conjunction with the cli/ipc to issue commands to the window manager. The configuration for no.de includes keybinds that are used to auto-generate a sxhkdrc file.

• compositor

picom is the package that handles X window compositing. The picom file is loaded with the configuration settings on startup. This may be eventually become part of the config json file and auto-generated. It can also be disabled in the config.

• ui

User interface elements are a few goodies to enhance the environment. 1 example is the "desktop" which is a web page that handles a top bar and wallpaper. The stack behind the scenes is svelte and svelte-kit with node-gtk (and webkit2gtk) used to spawn the web page in an X window. This, and any additional UI can be disabled in the config.

• wm

Window manager is the biggest portion of this environment. It is an X11 tiling window manager written leveraging the node-x11 package. As applications request to be drawn, the window manager will lay them out in a tile algorithm. It also handles "workspaces" on each screen to give further control of when/where windows appear. It has the following features:

• workspace add
• workspace delete
• window launching
• window kill
• floating windows
• fullscreen windows
• switch workspace
• move to workspace
• cycle workspace
• flip layout
• move window within workspace
• resize window ratios

Prerequisites

Okay so here is where things stat to get wonky. Right now this is in very early development so there are a lot of assumptions and pre-reqs. Hopefully many of these will be removed as I find better ways to handle things, but for now your system has to be setup JUST so in order for this to work. I will try to lay it all out here:

• use Arch linux (btw). I have set this up and had it work on 2 separate Arch machines. Beyond that its totally YMMV.
• nodejs/npm This may seem obvious, but I'm sure it will cause some raised eyebrows. Importantly, you should be on [email protected] and [email protected]. I recommend volta to manage node/npm versions.
• google/zx this is an npm package from the folks at Google that helps with cli writing. It works best when installed globally via npm i -g zx. Its a local dependency of the cli tool already, so there is an opportunity to improve this out of being a "pre-requisite" in the future.
• linux packages the following Arch packages are required:
  • xorg-server
  • xorg-apps
  • xorg-xinit
  • gtk3
  • webkit2gtk
  • picom (or some fork ... ibhagwan or the like)
  • sxhkd
  • cairo
  • gobject-introspection
  • base-devel
  • git

 yay -S --needed \
  git \
  gtk3 \
  sxhkd \
  cairo \
  webkit2gtk \
  base-devel \
  xorg-server \
  xorg-apps \
  xorg-xinit \
  picom-ibhagwan-git \
  gobject-introspection 

Installation

• finish prerequisites
• clone this repo
• run npm install from the repo dir to install npm deps
• configure it by creating no.de.config.json in the root example
• run npm link from the repo dir to make no.de cmd available
• run no.de init to start it all up