deskctrl

A (fairly) small program for providing data to and controlling Hyprland and ags (Aylur's GTK Shell) on my machine. Because this is only meant for personal use, documentation is lacking and functionality only extends as far as I need (read: want) it to for my PC.

Compilation

To compile deskctrl, run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/27factorial/deskctrl.git
cd deskctrl
cargo build --release

The generated executable can be found in target/release/deskctrl.

deskctrl is only tested on the latest nightly Rust toolchain, although it will probably compile on the latest stable or earlier toolchain versions, as it doesn't use any nightly features (yet).

Paths

deskctrl uses a number of files on disk as either data, unix domain sockets, or for stdout/stderr.

• /dev/shm/deskctrld.sock -> The socket file for communication between the daemon and client processes. If your system does not have /dev/shm enabled, you can change the SOCKET_PATH constant to some other file path before compilation.
• /tmp/deskctrld.{out | err} -> The stdout and stderr files for the deskctrl daemon process.
• /tmp/deskctrld.pid -> The PID file for the deskctrl daemon process.
• /tmp/deskctrl/data/notifications.json -> The file containing notification data for ags to read from (usually using tail -F).
• /tmp/deskctrl/images/\<hash>.png -> Images pulled from DBus notifications. Cleaned up automatically when running deskctrl kill or when the image is no longer in use.

Why?

As you may notice when skimming the codebase, much of the data provided by deskctrl is already built into ags itself, so then what's the point of this program?

The short answer is "Because I wanted to." The longer answer is:

1. I wanted to try my hand at building a more complex Linux program that utilizes daemons, DBus, and Unix Domain Sockets.
2. I wanted a way to provide notifications to ags that have more information encoded than what tools like dunst, mako or the ags notification daemon offer. None of these tools offers a way that I can find to group notifications by app, so I figured I would just add that to my current deskctrl program instead.

Usage

Run deskctrl --help for information on how to use the tool.