FAQ

What will breaking changes look like

Quickshell will have breaking changes in future releases. These changes can span the APIs exposed by Quickshell, as well as best practice across all APIs, but will not change the language syntax or anything exposed by Qt.

Most changes will be relatively trivial, though you may have to make the same trivial change a considerable amount of times if you have a large configuration.

Migration guides will be provided between each release version.

Should I use a process per widget

No. Using a process per widget will use significantly more memory than using a single process.

Make a rounded window

Rounded windows are simply transparent, square windows, with a rounded rectangle inside of them.

PanelWindow {
  color: "transparent"

  Rectangle {
    // match the size of the window
    anchors.fill: parent

    radius: 5
    color: "white" // your actual color
  }
}

Make a list of widgets

If you have a short list of items to display, such as a list of active music players or system tray items, you want a Repeater, which is usually combined with a RowLayout or ColumnLayout.

If you have a longer list, such as a list of entries in an application launcher or a list that needs to be scrolled, you want a ListView instead.

Run a program or script

Use Process.

If you want the entire output of the process as a single string, use StdioCollector to collect the Process’s stdio.

If the process is intended to run for a long time and stream in data, e.g. a command that listens to window manager IPC commands, use SplitParser to return each datum as it arrives.

Show widgets conditionally

Conditionally showing widgets can be done in two ways, simply using the Item.visible property, or by using a Loader.

Depending on your use case, both the Loader and the Item.visible property may make sense at equal complexity. If you want to unload a widget tree to save memory or speed up load times, then you should use Loaders.

Note that you can also change out a Loader’s component conditionally:

Loader {
  readonly property Component thing1: ...
  readonly property Component thing2: ...

  sourceComponent: condition ? thing1 : thing2
}

Round an image

The easiest way to round an image is with ClippingWrapperRectangle, which is a MarginWrapper component. This component will attempt to match the size of its contained item.

ClippingWrapperRectangle {
  radius: 10

  IconImage { // or a normal Image
    source: ...
    implicitSize: ...
  }
}

Reference images and resources

By default, paths passed to components such as Image or FileView as strings are relative to Quickshell’s working directory. Usually, this is not the desired behavior.

To get a file path relative to the current QML file, you can use Qt.resolvedUrl().

To get a file path relative to your shell’s reserved cache, data, or state directories, you can use Quickshell.cachePath(), Quickshell.dataPath() or Quickshell.statePath(),

Add a drop-shadow

Use RectangularShadow if you want a rectangular, round rectangular, or circular drop shadow.

For any other shape, you will have to use a MultiEffect and set MultiEffect.shadowEnabled, as well as its other shadow and blur related properties.

Get rid of the purple/black icons

The Quickshell.iconPath() function has three variants:

• One draws a purple/black square if the icon is missing.
• One allows you to specify a fallback icon if the desired one is missing.
• One returns an empty string if the icon is missing.

Either of the last two variants can be used to avoid the purple/black square.

Work with an unsupported WM

Quickshell currently only bundles interfaces for working with Hyprland and i3, however you can implement your own using Socket or Process, which can be used to parse and send IPC messages.

Open/close windows with commands

Quickshell doesn’t come with a command to open or close a window; however, you can make your own using IpcHandler, allowing you to call functions inside of Quickshell with a command. Said functions can change the QsWindow.visible property of a window, or load/unload it using a LazyLoader.

Reduce memory usage

The main thing you can do to reduce the memory usage of a given configuration is to use Loaders.

Loaders can be used to create objects only when needed, and destroy them when not needed.

Loader should be used if the component being loaded inherits from Item, otherwise, a LazyLoader should be used.

There is a hole in my window

If you set a Rectangle’s color to "transparent" and touch its border property, you’ll hit QTBUG-137166, which causes everything under the transparent rectangle to become invisible.

Adding a definition like border.width: 0 seems to work around it, especially if the only border property you wanted to set was radius.

My window should not be opaque

If a window is created with an opaque background color, Quickshell will use a window surface format that is opaque. This is done to reduce the amount of processing the gpu must do to draw it.

If you change the background color of your window between opaque and transparent colors, then this may affect you.

To tell Quickshell that you want to create a window capable of showing transparency, use QsWindow.surfaceFormat to set opaque to false.