Dynamic island and dock for KDE Plasma on Wayland.

An island anchored to the top edge showing media, time and volume, and a dock growing from the bottom edge. Written in QML on top of Quickshell, using wlr-layer-shell and the system's native services.

What it does

Island. Collapsed it shows an audio visualiser, the clock and the album art. Hovering expands it into one of four modes, switched with the scroll wheel or by clicking the dots:

• Media — album art, track and transport controls
• Control centre — Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mute and volume
• Status — CPU, memory and network throughput
• Calendar — month view with a pomodoro timer

Dock. Pinned apps inherited from your Plasma task manager, plus the apps you currently have open, separated by a divider. Drag to reorder, right click to pin or unpin, and an optional launcher button opening a categorised application grid with search.

Launcher. Favourites, categories and places, taken from KDE's own menu and kept in step with it: favourite something in either and it shows up in the other. Recent applications and recent files. Search across applications, files and a calculator, KRunner-style. Bound to the Meta key by default.

Clipboard. What you copied before, on Meta+V and in the launcher under its own category. Text, files and pictures. Nothing outlives the session and nothing reaches the disk, and whatever the program that copied it marked as a password is not kept at all.

Notifications. A server of its own, shown on the island or as a card, with history that outlasts the shell restarting, do not disturb, and silencing during a focus session.

Settings. Right click the dock. Position, auto-hide, opacity, background blur, corner radius, icon shape and size, accent colour, per-monitor placement, per-monitor brightness, night light, power profile and keeping the machine awake. Language: English, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. Everything applies live.

All of it is one JSON file you can edit by hand, and every key in it is written down in docs/settings.md.

Installing

Arch, CachyOS and derivatives

paru -S shima-shell   # or: yay -S shima-shell

Everywhere else

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ayozetr/shima-shell/main/install.sh | sh

One command. It works out what your distribution needs, asks before installing anything, and puts Shima in ~/.local.

Debian installs KDE without curl, and it is not the only one. The same line with wget:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ayozetr/shima-shell/main/install.sh | sh

It asks whether to start Shima when you log in. If you say no there, the switch is in Settings · General · Start with the system.

For how it goes on each distribution, see docs/distributions.md.

Uninstalling

Run this first, while Shima is still installed — it hands the Meta key back to Plasma:

shima --cleanup

Then remove it the way you installed it:

paru -R shima-shell         # or
./install.sh --uninstall    # this one runs --cleanup for you

Also worth having

Not needed, and nothing here depends on them. Just good projects.

• Darkly — Qt style and window decoration
• KDE Rounded Corners — rounded corners on every window
• Papirus — icon theme, the one Shima draws from

Origin

Shima Shell is an independent project, unaffiliated with the Bloom project or its authors, but it started out inspired by Bloom, which does something similar on Windows. The code is its own: Bloom is a Tauri application with a Rust backend written against the Windows APIs, which have no direct equivalent on Wayland.

Support

Shima is free and always will be. If it is useful to you and you feel like it: ko-fi.com/ayozetr.

License

The code

Copyright © 2026 ayozetr

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

The assets

Everything under assets/ — the name, the icon and the logotype — is not covered by the GPL. All rights are reserved by the author.

The one exception is assets/vendor/, which holds the GitHub and Ko-fi marks used in the settings window to link to those two places. Those belong to their owners; see the note beside them.

They may be used in forks made to contribute back to this project — see CONTRIBUTING — but not in an independent one.

Publishing a modified Shima as a product of its own, under this name and with these assets, is not permitted. The code itself stays under the GPL.