I put a Dynamic Island on Linux

Droppy is Mac-only. NotchNook is Mac-only. My 16" M1 Pro is running Omarchy. The camera hole was sitting there doing nothing.

So I built Naarchy. Native GTK4. Hyprland layer-shell. MIT. Not Electron.

The idle island is 370×67 because that is the hole, measured on 3456×2234 at scale 1. When a timer is running it hangs 72px with ears so the countdown sits on the glass, not in the webcam.

The island is the product

Hover the top edge. A black glass card grows out of the notch. Timer on the left, media on the right, a dock underneath. Clicks only land on the capsule and the dock. Everything else at the top of the screen stays yours. That is set_input_region, not a slogan.

The timer is a ruler. Scrub it. Let go. It starts. Click to pause. Click again to resume. When it hits zero the whole display strobes and an alarm loops until you click the flash, hit a key, or dismiss. The first version of that fire check was remaining == 0 && running(). running() requires remaining > 0. Dead code. It fires now.

Drop a file anywhere on it

GTK4 file managers send GdkFileList, not a text/uri-list string. We were listening for the string. Drops felt like they only worked on Inbox because that's the only tab that looked like a drop zone.

Every tab accepts files now. Hold a file over the island and a dotted Drop to Inbox overlay fades in. Release and it jumps you to Inbox with a thumbnail grid.

Collapsed, you get a stacked pile of the latest thumbs and a count. Timer still wins if one is running.

The rest

Clipboard history with search and pin. Calendar with ICS feeds, Meet/Zoom join, and "leave at 9:23." Volume and brightness HUDs. Omarchy theme follow.

No telemetry. Socket is $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/naarchy.sock, mode 600.

Install

sudo pacman -S --needed gtk4 gtk4-layer-shell rust
git clone https://github.com/michaelmonetized/naarchy
cd naarchy
cargo install --path . --locked
systemctl --user enable --now naarchy.service

Source, screenshots, and a 10-second recording: github.com/michaelmonetized/naarchy.

If you are still staring at a dead strip of pixels above your display, you already know what to do.

— Michael C. Hurley