Montressor

The brief

Most Linux customizing stops at "configure things to look pretty." I wanted the opposite — a desktop where every visible piece was built, not just themed, and where the whole system spoke one visual language end to end.

Montressor is that desktop: an Arch + Hyprland workstation with a hand-rolled waybar, custom GTK popups for every interactive control, and the Andromeda palette running edge-to-edge — same cyan accent and JetBrains Mono I use on this site and the Al Bhed translator. The desktop dotfiles live in the public montressor repo; the Claude Code agent crew that runs on top stays in a separate private repo. The crew is the secret sauce; it stays sealed.

Why it mattered

I use my desktop and terminal eight hours a day. The cost of not shaping that environment compounds — every paper-cut I tolerated was one I'd tolerate forever. Stock waybar modules are fine until you want them to behave a specific way; once you do, they're a wall. So I went under it.

The result is a desktop I can read at a glance and operate by muscle memory, with zero third-party widgets I didn't write or fork myself.

The approach

Three rules drove every decision:

1. Hand-build, don't import. Every interactive control — battery, network, audio, brightness, calendar — is a Python + GTK3 + GtkLayerShell script that follows one pattern. Once you know the pattern, a new popup takes 20 minutes.
2. Click opens, Escape closes. No hover-to-open, no auto-close on focus-out, no surprise dismissals when the cursor drifts. The desktop respects intent.
3. One palette, one font, everywhere. Andromeda cyan for active/connected, green for healthy, yellow for warning, red for critical/off. JetBrains Mono Nerd Font on every surface. Cross-surface coherence isn't decoration — it's how I read the system at a glance.

Architecture notes

• Waybar, two patterns. Group/drawer modules for grouped status (connectivity → network → VPN; hardware → memory → CPU), and bespoke GTK popups for anything interactive. The bar itself is intentionally quiet — essentials always visible, secondary info one click away.
• Hyprland as the substrate. Custom keybinds drive workspace flow, scratchpads, and the popup launchers. Every bind is documented in hyprland.conf; nothing lives only in my head.
• Color-coded health states. Glow color on each popup matches the state of what it controls. A red audio popup means muted; cyan means active. The bar tells you the same thing the popup will, so opening it just adds detail.
• GPU-aware. Intel iGPU handles display, RTX 4060 dGPU runs intensive apps via prime-run. Never switch to dGPU-only mode — it breaks display output. The kind of footgun you learn exactly once.
• Dotfiles synced hands-off. A dots zsh function detects which repo $PWD is in (public dotfiles vs. private prompts) and commits + pushes that one. Neither repo sits dirty for long.

The GTK popup pattern

Every popup follows the same skeleton: PID file for click-toggle, GtkLayerShell anchored to the right edge of the bar, RGBA visual so the rounded corners read clean, debounced slider writes via GLib.timeout_add to avoid flooding pactl or sysfs. The Andromeda glow color is templated into the CSS per-popup, so audio gets cyan, network-down gets red, and battery-charging gets cyan with a different icon.

The trap I hit early: focus-out-event seems like the obvious "close when the user clicks away" signal. It also fires when the cursor moves from the bar toward the popup, causing immediate dismissal. Solution: don't use it. Escape closes, clicking the bar icon toggles, and that's the contract.

Other lessons that cost me an hour each:

• margin: 8px is the glow's breathing room outside the rounded card; padding: 16px is the content space inside. Mix them up and the shadow gets clipped.
• CSS braces need to be doubled ({{}}) inside Python .format() strings or you'll spend twenty minutes wondering why the template silently ate them.
• Slider labels need connect('format-value', ...) — set_format_value_func is GTK4 only and silently no-ops on GTK3.

Andromeda, the through-line

These tokens drive the waybar CSS, the GTK popups, this portfolio, and the Al Bhed translator. New surfaces inherit the language automatically — there's no separate "web theme" or "desktop theme," just Andromeda.

What I'd do differently

• Document the popup pattern in the repo, not just in my head. I built the second and third popups by copying the first, which works until the first one drifts. I now keep a canonical reference popup that other ones are linted against.
• Bake the hyprland keybind map into a generated cheatsheet. I have it in my head; nobody else does. A small script that reads hyprland.conf and emits a printable PDF would help when I switch machines.

See also

• raymondshiner/montressor — the public desktop dotfiles (Hyprland, waybar, kitty, popup scripts)
• The Claude Code agent crew that runs on top stays in a private repo. Want a guided tour? [email protected].