v1.20.1Desktop icons and live wallpapers

A whole desktop, themed from your wallpaper.

Lucid is a Material 3 Expressive shell for Hyprland, built on Quickshell. A bar, a dock that grows into a launcher, desktop widgets, a lock screen and a settings app, all wearing the colours of whatever is on your screen.

Install Lucid View on GitHub

$ git clone https://github.com/Sn3akyy1/lucid.git && cd lucid && ./install.sh

170 stars 6 forks Arch Linux and Hyprland

The Lucid desktop: the bar along the top, calendar and weather widgets on the left, a stacked clock and a music card on the right, and the dock along the bottom, over a pastel wallpaper of a girl under cherry blossom

All screenshots

Announcements

News from Lucid.

New releases, what is coming next, and anything else worth knowing. When a version lands, the shell tells you itself, in a notification just like this one.

Announcements3

New Lucid · 8 Oct 2026Release Lucid v1.20 is out Lucid 2. Every surface redrawn in Material You Expressive, a clock that grows into an app, a widget panel, sounds of its own, and twenty-five pull requests from Ciro Rivera. What's new Earlier Lucid · 22 Sep 2026Release Lucid v1.10.5 is out The shell starts on login again. If only the wallpaper came back after a restart, this is the fix. What's new Lucid · 17 Sep 2026Release Lucid v1.1.0 is out Lock screen, polkit, accounts and light mode. Everything the shell asks you for, it now asks for itself. What's new

What's in it

Everything a desktop needs, in one design language.

Every surface shares one palette, one set of motion curves and one settings app. The bar, the dock and the lock screen look like they came from the same place because they did.

6 modules

Bar

Workspaces, media, tray, clock, notifications and system, each a pill that opens into a panel. Float them as islands, or sit them in a notch flush with the screen edge.

System pill

Control centre

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with full panels behind them, brightness, volume and audio device switching, tiles you arrange like a phone's quick settings, then battery, RAM, CPU and every disk.

Scratchpads

Special workspaces

Music, chat and your to-do list slide over whatever you are doing and hide again with the same key. Each one starts its app if it isn't running.

Music Super+Shift+M
Comms Super+Shift+D
To-do Super+Shift+R
System monitor Ctrl+Shift+Esc

8 modes

Dock and launcher

A floating toolbar that grows into the launcher instead of opening a second window over it. One search field over apps, commands, emoji, the web, a command line, themes, wallpapers and clipboard history, and it finds open windows too. Type a sum for a calculator.

18 kinds, 61 looks

Desktop widgets

Clocks, calendars, weather, media, a live visualiser, notes, to-dos, timers, photos and your phone, all on a widget panel you drag them out of. Snap them to the guides, and they come back where you left them.

25 pages

Settings

A GUI for all of it, down to your network, displays, Hyprland's windows and input, storage, user accounts and phone. Search finds any option, and every control shows a reset arrow once it moves off its default.

Session lock

Lock and login

A real session lock that checks your password through PAM and counts your tries against faillock, with a matching login screen for SDDM.

Grows out of your desktop
PAM
faillock countdown
Caps Lock badge
Polkit prompts
SDDM theme

Everything in Lucid

Theming

Seven palettes, or your wallpaper's own.

Matugen and Pywal build a Material 3 palette from your wallpaper. Catppuccin Mocha, Gruvbox, Nightfox, Nord and Tokyo Night stay put. Every one of them has a light mode.

Change the wallpaper, change the desktop. The shell reads one file of Material 3 colour roles, and it is rebuilt whenever you pick a new picture.
Light mode is built, not inverted. Nord lands on its own Snow Storm, Gruvbox on its own cream, and light surfaces carry a trace of the accent.
Bring any scheme. Settings → Palettes holds 560 base16 and base24 schemes, one click to use, or paste the URL of a colour-scheme repo and Lucid builds a full palette from it. Nothing from the repo is ever run.
It reaches past the shell. Kitty, the starship prompt, VSCodium and the login screen take the same colours, and GTK and Qt apps follow light or dark.

Theme

The same controls as Settings → Theme, running on the palettes the shell ships. Your pick sticks, on every page, until you change it.

Light or darkRe-derives the palette from your wallpaper in the mode you pick.

Colour schemeSwitching repaints this page in that palette.

Palette widgetThe card you can put on your desktop. Click a colour to copy its hex.

Matugen

Install

Three commands on Arch Linux.

The installer checks your system, asks before it installs anything, and backs up whatever it replaces.

$ git clone https://github.com/Sn3akyy1/lucid.git
$ cd lucid
$ ./install.sh

Then run hyprctl reload, or log out and back in. On first run, set a wallpaper from Settings → General. That is what generates your palette.

Read the install guide What gets installed

Checks your systemRefuses to run anywhere it can't finish the job, rather than leaving you half-installed.
Installs dependenciesUses paru or yay, falls back to pacman, and lists everything before it touches your system.
Copies the shellTo ~/.config/quickshell, moving any existing config aside with a timestamp first.
Sets up HyprlandKeybinds, window and layer rules, blur, animations and an autostart. It asks before replacing your config.
Sets up themingThe palettes, the wallpaper hook and the matugen template, appended to your matugen config, never replacing it.
Applies the lookKitty, starship, the VSCodium theme and the GTK theme. --no-look skips all of it.
Pins the dockReads your installed apps, so the dock is never a row of blank tiles.
Offers to restartA running shell moves onto the new files.

Keyboard first

Tap Super. Everything else is a chord away.

The installer ships a full set of binds. If you'd rather write your own, every surface can be driven with qs ipc call.

Launcher

Super tap

Command palette

Super+P

Workspace overview

Super+W

Settings

Super+S

Emoji picker

Super+.

Clipboard history

Super+Shift+V

Copy text off the screen

Super+Shift+T

On-screen keyboard

Super+K

Window switcher

Ctrl+Alt+Tab

Session screen

Super+Esc

Region screenshot

Super+D

Music workspace

Super+Shift+M

Every keybind IPC reference

Help

Stuck on something?

Help Center

Fixes for the problems people hit most: choppy animations on NVIDIA, another daemon stealing notifications, a grey palette, blur that frosts your windows.

Search answers

Report a bug

Fill in a short form and open a GitHub issue that already holds your versions, your steps and your log.

Build a report

What's new

v1.20 is Lucid 2: Material You Expressive everywhere, a clock app, a widget panel, sounds of its own and a Storage page.

Read the changelog

Release · 8 October 2026

Lucid 1.20

Lucid 2

Lucid 2. Every surface is redrawn in Material You Expressive on one shared kit of controls, the clock grows into an app, the launcher learns new modes and the control centre's tiles are yours to arrange. On top of that sits a release's worth of new features, most of them from Ciro Rivera, who wrote twenty-five of its pull requests.

The Lucid desktop: calendar and weather widgets on the left, a stacked clock and a music card on the right, over a pastel wallpaper

Material You Expressive, everywhere

The bar, the dock, the launcher, the control centre, the widgets, the lock screen and the settings now share one kit of controls and the same expressive shapes. Icons are Material Symbols drawn from Google's own paths, text is set in Google Sans Flex, and Interface size scales all of it from 75 to 125 %.

The clock app on its Today page, among clock, music, calendar, weather, battery, system and to-do widgets

The clock is an app

Behind the bar's clock: today with the weather and what is next, a month calendar with reminders, countdown timers and a pomodoro, a stopwatch with laps, and world clocks. Whatever is counting shows on the pill as a chip with a ring.

The widget panel on its Clock gallery, beside a Coming up card and lucidfetch on the desktop

A widget panel

Right-click the desktop and choose Widget Panel: every widget is drawn live on a sheet, and you drag one straight out to where it should sit. Every widget is rebuilt, and Timer, At a Glance, Photo and Fetch join them.

Also in 1.20

Sounds of its own. Synthesised notification sounds, system sounds for devices, the charger and the camera, and tiny ticks for your keys.
A session screen Super+Esc and a window switcher Ctrl+Alt+Tab
The lock screen grows out of your desktop, and unlocking runs it back onto your live windows.
Workspaces as shapes: a dot, a square, and a new Material shape for the one you are on.
Control centre tiles you arrange, night light among them.
A launcher that finds more: emoji, the web and a command line by prefix, and open windows, app actions and power from a typed search.
New settings pages for Storage, Hyprland's windows and input, colours and palettes, and a search over every setting.
What's new, in the shell. The first start after an update shows what it brings, once.
About 150 MB less memory at rest.

Twenty-five of this release's pull requests came from Ciro Rivera: settings search, the Windows, Input, Colours and Palettes pages, the bar's layout and looks, night light and more. Workspaces grouped by display came from @MrZtone, and installer fixes from @arbelonson-source. Thank you.

Updating

Pull and run the installer again. Your settings, pinned apps and bar layout come with you.

$ git pull && ./install.sh

The installer leaves your keybinds alone, so add the new ones under Settings → Keybinds: Super+Esc runs qs ipc call session toggle, and Ctrl+Alt+Tab runs qs ipc call switcher next.

Release · 22 September 2026

Lucid 1.10.5

The shell starts on login again

If the bar, the dock and the widgets were gone after a restart, and only the wallpaper came back, this release fixes it.

What was wrong

The line that starts the shell when you log in opened with [ -x … ]. Hyprland reads a command that opens with [...] as exec rules, like [workspace 2] kitty, so it ran nothing, and said nothing. Running the installer again only brought the shell back because its last step starts it. The line uses test -x now.

Found by @ciroenrique4-eng. Thank you.

Updating

Pull and run the installer again. It replaces ~/.config/hypr/modules/autostart.lua with the fixed one.

$ git pull && ./install.sh

If you kept your own Hyprland config when the installer asked, nothing in it starts Lucid. Add this to ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.lua:

hl.on("hyprland.start", function ()
    local launcher = os.getenv("HOME") .. "/.config/lucid/launch-shell.sh"
    hl.exec_cmd("test -x '" .. launcher .. "' && exec '" .. launcher .. "' || exec quickshell")
end)

Release · 17 September 2026

Lucid 1.1.0

Lock screen, polkit, accounts and light mode

Everything the shell asks you for, it now asks for itself: your password at the lock screen, an administrator's for the rest of the machine, and the accounts that sign in to it. All of it in Lucid's own design, with a login screen wearing the same palette.

The Lucid lock screen: a large clock on the left, and the sign-in card, the song playing and notifications on the right

A lock screen of its own

Rebuilt from scratch and laid out the way Material You lays out a lock screen: an oversized clock in the wallpaper's own colour, the weather, what is playing and your notifications at a glance. Your password goes through PAM, so any account can unlock, and a wrong one counts down against faillock's real limit.

Lucid's authentication dialog asking to run a program as another user, with two accounts to choose from

Every password prompt, in one dialog

Lucid is now the session's polkit agent. Mounting a disk, changing the time zone or running pkexec asks through the shell's own dialog, which says what is being asked and whose password it wants. polkit and PAM still decide; only the dialog is Lucid's.

The Lucid control centre: quick setting tiles, brightness and volume, now playing, and CPU, memory, battery and disk

A control centre that goes deeper

Notifications moved to their own pill, and the System pill kept device state: switch audio outputs and inputs from the volume rows, hold off sleep with a Caffeine tile, and read CPU temperature, memory in gigabytes and uptime.

Also in 1.1.0

Users and accounts. Add, remove and edit every account on the machine from Settings, pictures and groups included.
A new notification centre. Grouped by app, with inline reply, progress bars, and popups that stack under the bar.
Clipboard history in the launcher, images too. Super+Shift+V
An on-screen keyboard that never takes the focus off what you are typing into. Super+K
Light mode, built from each palette's own colours rather than inverted.
A login screen for SDDM, so the machine looks like itself before you have signed in.
Smooth on NVIDIA. Animations run at your screen's refresh rate.

The first community contributions landed too: a KDE Connect widget by @k-k-j123, a Sound page by @MrZtone and installer fixes by @arbelonson-source. Thank you.

Updating

Pull and run the installer again. Your settings, pinned apps and keys come with you.

$ git pull && ./install.sh