mcs-qs

mcs-qs is a custom fork of Quickshell — a flexible QtQuick-based desktop shell toolkit for Wayland. Originally based on noctalia-qs.

What is mcs-qs?

mcs-qs extends Quickshell with additional features and patches, including:

• ext-background-effect-v1 Wayland protocol support
• Niri and DWL compositor support
• PipeWire audio spectrum analyzer
• Clipboard image support (setClipboardImage)
• IPC with optional arguments
• Inverted corner support for regions
• Quickshell.Services.SysInfo — native system monitoring (CPU, memory, temps, network, disk I/O, GPU). GPU metrics cover AMD via sysfs, NVIDIA via dlopened libnvidia-ml.so.1 (graceful fallback when absent), and Intel clock. Zero subprocess polling.
• xdg-desktop-portal Screenshot and ScreenCast backends — apps go through org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot and org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast for native screenshots and screen-share, with the picker UI and persist-token storage owned by the shell. Drop-in replacement for xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.
• Quickshell.Services.PipeWire.PwScreenCastStream — publish a video source as a PipeWire Video/Source node so any consumer (browser, OBS, GStreamer) can receive frames. Used internally by the ScreenCast portal but exposed as a generic building block.
• DBusIpcHandler — declaratively publish QML functions, signals, and properties over a private D-Bus surface; takes the place of ad-hoc mcs-qs ipc call shell-outs and lets external clients drive the shell with type-safe contracts.
• Native logind (org.freedesktop.login1) and BlueZ pairing-agent bindings — replaces loginctl/bluetoothctl shell-outs with reactive D-Bus services.
• Pipewire.setForceRate() — native sample-rate override via the global PipeWire metadata, no pw-metadata shell-out.
• HttpFetcher — reusable async HTTP/JSON fetcher; replaces curl shell-outs for weather, holidays, and similar polled data.

The binary is named mcs-qs and is a drop-in replacement for quickshell.

Credits

mcs-qs is built on top of Quickshell, developed by outfoxxed and contributors, and was originally forked from noctalia-qs by the Noctalia project.

• Quickshell website: https://quickshell.org
• Quickshell source: https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell
• Quickshell mirror: https://github.com/quickshell-mirror/quickshell

All credit for the core framework goes to the Quickshell project and its contributors.

Building

See BUILD.md for build instructions.

cmake -GNinja -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build
# binary: build/src/mcs-qs

License

Licensed under the GNU LGPL 3, same as the upstream Quickshell project.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution submitted for inclusion shall be licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.