Dank Material Shell

I like tiling window managers like Hyprland or Niri on Linux, and I use them on all my personal machines. They are great and give you a lot of control in how your desktop environment should behave and feel. But they often don’t come with batteries included. You do not get a task bar or a system clock, an icon tray or an application launcher. This is a blessing if you like really making things your own. If you’re kind of lazy and just want something that’s good enough, it can be a curse.

For a long time, I ran a very scuffed eww-based setup that I stole from a very old version of the dotfiles of fufexan, or Mihai Fufezan. This worked, but since the setup was removed from the original repo, clearly no longer used, I had to copy it completely to my own dotfiles, it required me to compile some dependencies just for itself, and I was never quite happy with it. But it did work.

Then in a recent Brodie Robertson video, I learnt about the existence of Dank Material Shell. It came with wonderfully simple installation instructions for NixOS. I ran into some issues when running dms setup after the installation to apply some standard settings to Hyprland and kitty as I manage their configs with nix, and so the files cannot be edited in place directly. So I asked claude code to look into what the setup entails exactly and to apply that to my nix config, and 5 minutes later my system looked much better than it ever had!

I had to adjust some minor things, the button for the keybind cheat sheet had to be changed as the German keyboard layout doesn’t have a / key, I still needed to adjust the hotkey for locking my display, and I had to disable the sound when my laptop starts or stops charging as it is configured to stop charging around the 90% battery mark so the alert would constantly trigger. But the rest Just Worked. I now have a notification history and actually nice quick access controls for things. I can see my CPU and memory usage at a glance, always, and have quick access to a process manager.

Now, do I need any of these things? No, which is also why I never ended up putting in the effort of setting them up myself. But now I just get them with 5 minutes of work, and it is legitimately really nice. Thanks, Dank Shell and others who make custom window manager setups so much simpler and approachable!