inua

A quiet desktop shell for Hyprland, written in Go and GTK4. inua.one

Hyprland manages your windows; inua gives you the rest of a desktop around them, in one calm visual language: a bar, a launcher, a control center, notifications, a dock, a wallpaper, settings, and a set of apps.

• Pure Go, no cgo. GTK4 through puregotk, layer surfaces through gtk4-layer-shell. CGO_ENABLED=0 go build builds the whole shell.
• Layouts are markup. Every surface is a Blueprint file styled with CSS from colour tokens; Go only fills in state.
• The compositor is the truth. Windows, workspaces and focus come from Hyprland's IPC; inua never keeps a second copy.

The shell

Bar	Workspaces, the focused window, the clock and calendar, the tray. One per monitor.
Launcher	Apps, windows and commands in one search; also arithmetic, units, currencies, emoji (:) and the assistant (?).
Overview	Live previews of every workspace (Hyprland 0.55+).
Control center	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Focus, Tailscale, brightness, volume, media and power.
Notifications	inua is the notification server: banners, then a center grouped by app.
Dock	Pinned and running apps, and a drawer of the shell's tools.
Settings	One searchable window, applied as you change it: displays, keyboard and touchpad, Bluetooth, shortcuts, themes, About.
Lock screen	On the compositor's session lock: if the shell stops, the screen stays locked.
Screenshots	Areas, windows, screens and recordings, with a drawer of recent shots.
Wallpaper	A new picture drawn each day, or your own.
Passwords and secrets	The Polkit agent, gpg's pinentry, and inua-keyring, a Secret Service backed by pass.

In detail: docs/features.md.

The apps

Files	A keyboard-first file manager: two panes, drives through UDisks2, remote disks through rclone. docs/files.md
Terminal	Workspaces of terminals for running many agents at once, each one's state in view; also on a phone. docs/terminal.md
Mail	Every account in three columns: Gmail, Outlook and IMAP, with phishing checks and the assistant. docs/mail.md
Assistant	An agent that answers about this computer and acts on it, asking first; its tools are also an MCP server (inua mcp). docs/mcp.md
Viewer	Images, PDFs, Markdown and text.
Virtual machines	Windows (Dockur), Linux, FreeBSD and your own systems (QEMU), each a folder with a machine.toml.
Remote Desktop	Share this desktop and reach others over Moonlight's protocol. docs/remote-desktop.md
Mobile Link	Your phone and this computer together, over KDE Connect's protocol. docs/mobile-link.md
Disk Usage	What fills a disk, and what of it can safely go. docs/disk-usage.md
Light apps	Clock, Weather, Stocks, Calculator, Calendar, Color Picker, System Monitor, Tailscale, Pass, GPG, Music and Video.

In detail: docs/apps.md.

Install

curl -fsSL https://inua.one/install.sh | sh

Then log out and pick Inua at the login screen.

The script installs the latest release for amd64 or arm64 into ~/.local, offers the packages inua needs (apt, pacman, dnf or zypper), writes your configuration with inua init without replacing your files, and adds the Inua login session (sudo). Where inua would replace something you have — gpg's pinentry, gnome-keyring, another shell, the login manager — it asks first; on Debian and Ubuntu, inua's pinentry can also become the system's, through update-alternatives. INUA_VERSION=v0.1.2 picks a release.

inua upgrade updates in place; the shell also checks once a day and offers an Upgrade button.

Requirements:

• Hyprland 0.53 or later, GTK 4.22, gtk4-layer-shell 1.3 (Ubuntu 26.04 or a distribution with the same packages; on Fedora, Hyprland from a COPR)
• Recommended: pass and gnupg for inua-keyring; GStreamer's plugins for Music and Video
• The usual services: NetworkManager, BlueZ, UPower, power-profiles-daemon, PipeWire. Without one, its part of the shell says "Unavailable".

The full package list is in docs/design.md. On Ubuntu Desktop, see removing GNOME.

Into an existing Hyprland setup

Keep your config and add:

exec-once = inua-shell
source = ./inua.conf      # keep this last

or, in hyprland.lua (Hyprland 0.55+):

hl.on("hyprland.start", function() hl.exec_cmd("inua-shell") end)
pcall(require, "inua")    -- keep this last

inua config hyprland checks it. Setup in detail: config/README.md.

From source

git clone https://github.com/lyricat/inua
cd inua
make deps deps-desktop   # packages (sudo)
make install-session     # programs into ~/.local/bin, your config, the login session (sudo)

make install alone installs the programs; run inua init once after it.

Use

Keys
Super+Space	Launcher
Super+Tab	Overview
Super+A	Control center
Super+N	Notification center
Super+Comma	Settings
Super+L	Lock
Print	Screenshot
Super+Shift+R	Restart the shell

Everything is also a command:

inua call launcher toggle
inua call screenshot window
inua show                  # everything `call` accepts

Settings live in ~/.config/inua/config.toml, written by the settings window and fine to edit by hand (inua config check, then inua call shell reload). Every option is in the sample. Hyprland's own settings go to ~/.config/hypr/inua.conf; restyle anything in ~/.config/inua/style.css.

Development

Go 1.26 or later.

make             # every program into bin/
make test        # session script tests, go vet, Go tests with -race
make generate    # ui/*.blp → ui/*.ui (blueprint-compiler)
make i18n        # po/inua.pot and the catalogs
make nested      # the shell in a nested Hyprland window

inua-shell -ui-dir ui reads layouts and styles from disk; inua call shell restart re-executes the shell after a rebuild.

Start with the architecture; the look and its rules are in design/ui.md, translations in docs/i18n.md (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French), start-up time in docs/performance.md.

CI checks formatting, regenerates layouts and catalogs, runs make test and builds on Ubuntu 26.04. A pushed tag (v0.1.2) builds a release with GoReleaser.

Credits

Icons by Phosphor (MIT, ui/icons/LICENSE); the terminal's agent marks from LobeHub (MIT, ui/icons/LICENSE-lobehub; the marks remain their owners' trademarks). Terminal engine: libghostty-vt (MIT). Emoji names from Unicode's data and CLDR (internal/emoji/LICENSE-UNICODE). Exchange rates from the European Central Bank (through Frankfurter), the Bank of England (through AllRatesToday, when Frankfurter is down) and Coinbase. Built on Hyprland, GTK, puregotk, gtk4-layer-shell and godbus.

License

Apache License 2.0.