_{workspace 2 · neovim, fastfetch, cava · 1366×768 · every colour taken from the wallpaper}

A scrollable-tiling Wayland desktop for a two-core laptop with a small screen.
Noctalia reads a palette off the wallpaper and writes it into everything else.
The lock screen plays records.

the lock screen

Nocturne is a lock-screen layout built from Turntable, a Noctalia plugin in this repo (1.5k lines of Luau).

• record — the current track's album art at 33⅓ rpm, with a tonearm that swings on and off. Labels are pre-rendered at 48 angles once per track and swapped by opacity, so spinning never decodes an image.
• clock — light hours over black minutes; every digit morphs outline-to-outline, breaking into dithered pixels halfway. Click the time to switch 12h / 24h.
• key — the password field dressed as a key, portrait on the bow. Click the bow to flip it and see how long the screen has been locked.
• sky — screenager.dev's pixel-art night, rendered by the site's own generator at exactly 1366×768.
• cost — ~30 updates a second while something moves, one a second when nothing does.

The same record, 18px wide, spins in the middle of the bar. Left click plays or pauses, right click skips, middle click goes back.

rebuild the layout or the artwork

cd ~/.local/share/noctalia/plugins/turntable/tools

# place the widgets: rewrites [lockscreen] and [lockscreen_widgets]
python3 nocturne_layout.py ~/.local/state/noctalia/settings.toml

# record body and tonearm frames
python3 render_assets.py

# the night sky (needs the screenager.dev source and brave)
./render_night.sh [seed-hex]

Needs python-pillow, python-numpy and busctl (systemd). The layout is measured for one 1366×768 output named eDP-1.

palette

Material tones (m3-content) that Noctalia pulled from the meadow above. They are not hard-coded: change the wallpaper and the bar, borders, terminals, btop, cava, GTK, Qt, Zen, VS Code, Zed, Obsidian and Neovim all change with it. Neovim repaints live on SIGUSR1.

what's inside

Each folder mirrors $HOME.

package
niri	Compositor config split into cfg/*.kdl. 4px gaps, square corners, a 1px focus ring, blur behind windows. noctalia.kdl is generated.
noctalia	Shell: an 18px bar, launcher, panels, notifications, idle and lid handling, theme templates. Includes the GUI-edited settings.toml.
turntable	The Noctalia plugin behind the lock screen and the bar's disc, plus its fonts (OFL).
nvim	AstroNvim v6. Everforest for code, wallpaper accents for the chrome, an animated start screen, CompetiTest for contests.
terminals	Alacritty (the one bound to a key), Kitty, Ghostty. Colours come from Noctalia.
zsh	CachyOS zsh config, a lean one-line Powerlevel10k, zoxide as cd.
tools	fastfetch, btop, cava, MangoHud.
git	Name, noreply email, gh as the credential helper. No tokens.
cp	Competitive-programming template.cpp and debug.h.
extras	Optional, never installed. See below.

neovim

• start screen — the SCREENAGER mark in a primary → tertiary gradient that a light sweeps across once, a greeting for the time of day, three recent files, the song playing, plugin count, startup time, git branch.
• colours — Everforest (hard, transparent) owns syntax. Floats, borders, the cursor line number and the indent scope follow the wallpaper; SIGUSR1 swaps in the full Matugen base16 palette without a restart.
• contests — CompetiTest listens for Competitive Companion from launch and files problems as <contest>/<A>.cpp for Codeforces and AtCoder. clangd for C++, with Tree-sitter for the first C++ buffer deferred one tick so a contest file opens instantly.

keys
Space r i / c	receive problem / contest
Space r r	run test cases
Space r a / e	add / edit a test case

noctalia

• bar — clock, CPU and the focused window on the left; workspaces and the spinning disc in the middle; tray and status on the right. 60% opacity over blur.
• idle — lock at 10 min, screen off at 11, suspend at 30. Closing the lid locks and suspends.
• templates — built-in: alacritty, btop, cava, gtk3, gtk4, niri, qt. Community: claude-code, codex, zen-browser, obsidian, vscode, zed, fastfetch, zathura. Own: VS Code Insiders and Neovim.
• state — noctalia-state-watch.sh (autostarted by niri) commits every write of settings.toml to a local git repo in ~/.local/state/noctalia. Needs inotify-tools.

install

git clone https://github.com/Tejas242/dots ~/dots
cd ~/dots
./install.sh --deps        # pacman + AUR packages, then every package into $HOME

./install.sh               # every package, no system packages
./install.sh nvim zsh      # only the ones you name

Files are copied, not symlinked: Noctalia rewrites settings.toml atomically, which would replace a symlink. Anything that would be overwritten moves to ~/.dots-backup/<timestamp>/ first. Then log out and back in.

On first start:

1. Noctalia renders its templates from the wallpaper (noctalia.kdl, terminal themes, nvim/lua/matugen.lua).
2. nvim bootstraps lazy.nvim and installs plugins.
3. Wallpaper paths in theme.toml and settings.toml are absolute (/home/screenager/…). Point them at your own home, or pick a wallpaper in Noctalia's settings.
4. The bar also uses three third-party Noctalia plugins that aren't in this repo: oldirtty/color_picker, noctalia/screen_recorder and goodroot/noctwhspr. Install them or drop them from the bar.

packages

--deps installs   niri zsh zoxide neovim ripgrep fd git gcc rsync python-pillow python-numpy alacritty kitty ghostty fastfetch btop cava mangohud, and noctalia-git from the AUR (via paru or yay).

used by the configs, not installed   cachyos-zsh-config zsh-theme-powerlevel10k ttf-jetbrains-mono-nerd ttf-roboto inotify-tools brightnessctl zen-browser youtube-music nautilus

keys

niri · Mod is Super · Mod Shift Esc lists all of them

keys
Mod Return	terminal
Mod A	launcher
Mod B · M · E	browser · music · files
Mod H J K L	focus column left · window down · window up · column right
Mod Ctrl H J K L	move them
Mod 1–9	workspace
Mod Ctrl 1–9	send column to workspace
Mod Tab	previous workspace
Mod + wheel	workspaces; with Shift, columns
Mod - / =	column width ∓10%; with Shift, window height
Mod C	centre column
Mod Ctrl F	fill the available width
Mod W	tabbed column
Mod T · F	float · fullscreen
Mod O	overview
Mod Q	close window
Mod Alt L	lock
Mod Shift Q	session menu
Ctrl Shift 1 · 2 · 3	screenshot region · screen · window
Ctrl Alt Delete	quit niri

sync

Edit configs where they live, then pull them back into the repo:

cd ~/dots
./sync.sh                  # or: ./sync.sh nvim noctalia
git add -A && git commit -m "sync" && git push

The PACKAGES table at the top of sync.sh is the list of tracked paths; add one there to start tracking it. On the way in, sync.sh swaps the git email for the GitHub noreply address and blanks the weather location.

extras

extras/niri/nocturne.kdl is a heavier niri overlay, tuned for a Vega 3:

• windows open by growing out of a small pill into a card, and close like a CRT switching off (custom shaders)
• slightly under-damped springs, so motion lands softly
• a #72dd71 → #8fd3c8 gradient focus ring, 6px corners, blur only behind terminals

Copy it next to config.kdl and add include "./nocturne.kdl" as the last line. Remove the line to undo.

_{niri · noctalia · astronvim · wallpaper from a GitHub collection that doesn't know who painted it either}

_{the long version, with a rubber duck: screenager.dev/setup}