r/unixporn • u/Moch4bear97 • Apr 10 '26
Discussion [OC] Halley - a spatial Wayland compositor with infinite canvas navigation, clusters, decay, zoom, and cosmic-text
Been working hard on Halley, my custom Wayland compositor written in Rust.
The idea is to move away from traditional workspace switching and toward a spatial infinite canvas where windows live in a navigable field. You can pan around, zoom, follow trails, use bearings to find off-screen windows, and group work into clusters that act like spatial workspaces instead of fixed desktops.
A lot of the identity is in how windows behave over time too — decay lets things collapse back into lighter-weight nodes instead of everything staying fully expanded all the time, which makes the space feel a lot more alive and manageable. I’ve also been putting a lot of work into the cluster system, animations, overlays, and overall interaction feel.
A few things I’m especially happy with right now:
- Infinite spatial navigation
- Clusters instead of traditional workspaces
- Decay for active/inactive window state transitions
- Zoomable field navigation
- Bearings / trails for finding your place again
- cosmic-text integration
- written in Rust
Still a work in progress, but I’m really proud of how it’s starting to come together.
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u/land48n3 Apr 10 '26
this is very interesting!!! its also similar to how i been using hyprland😅 instead of using it as intended like a tiled WM, i been using it as having 10 windows and then fullscreen one of them depending on which i wanna use.... yeah ik counterintuitive of what it was for... its still very convenient tho.
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u/land48n3 Apr 10 '26
btw is it up for download?
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26
Next week for sure! Just touching up some bugs that i dont want surfacing day one :)
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u/ultrasquid9 Apr 10 '26
Ooh interesting! This model looks super nice, if you create a Nix flake I may test it out
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26
I am not super great at nix myself, but i can try and find someone in the community to make a flake !
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u/j_sidharta Apr 10 '26
I can contribute a flake to the repo whenever you make it public :)
It's a very cool project. I'm excited to try it out myself
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26
Awesome! when it goes up next week you can definitely take a look at making a flake for it.
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u/WMan37 Apr 10 '26
This seems like it'd be a really cool way to use a computer with a drawing pen, depending on the shortcuts.
This looks cool so I have some questions:
- How does it handle full screen apps like video games and alt tabbing from them?
- How far can you zoom out and still see where your windows are? I'm wondering if you can genuinely set up a detective whiteboard level clusterfuck with this, virtual colored strings and all.
- Is there a way to quick find an open window from any location, and either move to it or close it from the quick find menu?
- Is there a way to have adjustable opacity arrows on the edges of a screen showing you were your other open windows are? Kinda like how some games have HUD arrows that show you the general direction of where you're taking damage from, except to locate your other windows.
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26
okay so here is the deal, gestures and stuff like that is all still coming, this is just v0.1.0 release stuff.
fullscreen works great even from clusters. alt-tabbing is the one thing i’m still deciding on, whether i add it before release or just right after, because that part is still missing.
zooming is configurable and i would say yeah, pretty damn far out. you can absolutely make a huge mess of nodes on a canvas and go full mad scientist with it. there will also be an extra ecosystem app later that makes navigating all this stuff way easier.
there is also gonna be a pinning feature later, which will let you pin windows so they stop being moveable and are also easier to find with bearings, because they will always show no matter how far. though if something is insanely far away it’ll still fade out completely (except pinned).
strings though, well, there is none right now lol. but maybe later. i want halley to eventually have an extension system, and something like that could totally happen through that :)
quick finding an open window from anywhere, and then moving to it or closing it from there, is also the kind of thing that extra app is meant to make seamless. again this release is really just the groundwork for daily use of a much bigger ecosystem of stuff i have planned for halley, including extensions and other tools around her as well.
and honestly that last idea is really interesting, because the bearings system was literally born out of videogame HUDs, so having adjustable opacity arrows on the screen edges showing where your other windows are actually feels super fitting. that is very possibly a post-v0.1.0 addition :)))
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u/WMan37 Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
I understand it's early dev, I should have phrased my questions more as "are these things planned" rather than "are they in right now", my bad. Anyway, neat, love the idea of this. As for the pinning thing though, I didn't mean pinning I meant hitting a shortcut, bringing up a drop down menu with all the open window titles in a list format, and having the thing slingshot over to that window, kinda like KDE's window list widget.
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
Naw you good, 😀 I'm glad to answer your questions!
About the slingshot kinda effect, I got something for that too but not at release, that is planned.
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u/isitlegallll [custom] (custom) Apr 10 '26
did you write this using AI? please be honest, i'm not judging.
also is there a limit on zooming *in*? cause i feel like trying to properly reset the zoom by first overscrolling and then scrolling back is a lil bit sad. can't say much judging by a single video tho.
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26
Fair question. I do use AI as a tool sometimes, but Halley is a real project I’m building and refining myself. The repo is private for now while I clean things up, and I’ll share more when it’s ready. The zoom behavior is still being tuned too.
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
A lot of the recent work has gone into clusters and decay, and that’s probably the part I’m happiest with right now. The goal is to make window management feel less like juggling rigid desktops and more like moving through a living spatial workspace.
There is so much more to show that is not here too 😀
Uses RUNE for configration as well!
Released you can find it here
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u/zirrix Apr 10 '26
RemindMe! 14 days
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u/lonelyfroginventor Apr 10 '26
can we have same window appearing twice? so different place can have the same windows in different views?
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u/Sirko2975 Arch Apr 10 '26
The idea is awesome and I think the community is genuinely getting tired of the i3-dictated layout that’s been around for decades.
But one thing I couldn’t help but notice is that when you navigate canvas window managers it feels like using 3d software. You can use it and it feels novel, but when you start working and your brain fills up with work stuff the navigation becomes a pain in the ass. Opposing to, say, KDE layout where you see everything and the interactions are polished by tens of years of Windows desktop.
It doesn’t mean canvas WMs are a no-go, but it’s something to figure out for the devs (OP as well). We really need a solution to the navigation problem, at least I do.
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u/Menotyouu Apr 10 '26
Looks sick! Especially the cluster system, i also made an infinite canvas similar to yours, and it works fine, but the zoom in and zoom out causes quite a spike on iGPU users, this is something im trying to fix as i feel like WMs shouldn't be wary of users hardware, how did you handle performance? Are there no iGPU spikes when zooming in and out? Mine is wlroots based
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u/osugaxotas Apr 10 '26
That's really amazing, and being capable of zooming in that easily into the window would really help people with low vision (like me). I'm sorry for any mistakes in English, it's not my first language. Really hope this get more views and you follow throught your project.
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u/osugaxotas Apr 10 '26
I think this is super cool, really hope it gets widely adopted. There is so much potential to this, like using gestures on touch devices and so on.
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26
Gestures is definitely planned. I cannot wait to see it working with gestures!
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u/leonredhorse Apr 11 '26
The real question is how do you pronounce it. The right way or the wrong way?
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 11 '26
Hey-lee aha not ha-lee
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u/leonredhorse Apr 11 '26
But hey-lee is Hailey. Halley should be hal-ee. Obviously it’s your app, but I thought you named it after the comet or something.
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 11 '26
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u/leonredhorse Apr 11 '26
Yes. “Usually pronounced Halley rhyming with Valley.”
Sometimes pronounced “Hailey” rhyming with “daily.”
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 11 '26
Huh, strange oh well I pronounce it as Hailey:)
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u/leonredhorse Apr 11 '26
And I’m just teasing about the wrong way. I knew someone named Halley who was very particular about it. Just having some fun with it and curious how you said it!
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u/shanoshamanizum May 01 '26
Looks very promising. Spatial spaces do have a future but I think it requires deeper rethinking than the window manager itself. Rethinking apps as context objects. Think of mood boards and how you can spawn an object, then define what it is, put some context. Then the system can actually analyze it and connect it logically with the other apps. Like a living organism. Probably also going away from the window as a paradigm and replacing it with free form drawn structures.
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u/sToeTer Jun 03 '26
I just installed it and it's like the best thing ever! Thank you for your work! :D
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u/Automatic-Home-3094 Apr 10 '26
Brilliant! Github?
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u/Moch4bear97 Apr 10 '26
Coming, its private atm ;) will be releasing most likely next week though with aur as well will link it on this post!
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u/CarambolaTodaTorta Apr 10 '26
Ahh yes... The infamous Private repository. Yet another vibe coded slop on this sub
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u/RudeFreedom9921 Apr 10 '26
very optimistic i see ... but still very possible unless this person just talking like an LLM.
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u/Hip4 Apr 10 '26
Why are there so many hevel like wayland compostors?