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Glass and Gravity

v0.5.0

Halley v0.5.0 is a wide release: a brand-new native portal backend, frosted-glass effects, animated field backgrounds, the initial Halley Lift and Apogee releases, deeper input tuning, animation polish, and a steadier nested/session story.

Halley's fifth release is where the field gets both clearer and heavier: clearer because windows, overlays, bearings, Aperture, and the field background itself can now be drawn by the compositor; heavier because more of the desktop stack is owned by Halley itself.

v0.5.0 is also one of the broadest updates so far. It ships Halley Lift and Apogee for the first time, adds Halley's own xdg-desktop-portal backend for screenshots and screencasts, exposes real libinput and gesture controls, sharpens the session/nested split, and lands a long run of animation, fullscreen, resize, and game-path fixes.

Included

In This Release

Frosted-glass effects

A new effects block controls backdrop blur for overlays, windows, and layer-shell clients, with shadows moved out of decorations and into renderer-level effects.

Animated field backgrounds

The new background/gesso block can render a solid background, a classic image, or a spatial field shader. The builtin space shader pans and zooms with each monitor's Field camera and animates without stealing the desktop's redraw cadence.

Brand-new Halley portal

v0.5.0 introduces xdg-desktop-portal-halley, a native portal backend for ScreenCast and Screenshot requests instead of relying on the wlr capture backend.

Portal diagnostics

halleyctl portal status and halleyctl portal version report backend discovery, compositor IPC, advertised sources, cursor modes, and version details.

Halley Lift arrives

The initial Halley Lift release adds a compositor-integrated command palette for apps, nodes, clusters, actions, config search, and cluster drafts.

Lift terminal mode

term, /term, and /t searches run the typed command line inside the configured terminal through the user's interactive shell, so aliases, pipes, and quoting work.

Lift polish and speed

Background icon decoding, persistent icon indexing, caret settings, outline borders, search glyphs, apps-mode glyphs, and fallback row icons make Lift feel faster and more finished.

Input and gestures

Touchpad, mouse, per-device libinput overrides, touch passthrough, pinch zoom, swipe bindings, and multi-finger holds are now configurable from Halley config.

Apogee arrives

v0.5.0 introduces Apogee as Halley's overview surface for seeing windows and cluster cores spatially instead of losing them behind the current focus.

Alt+Tab in motion

The focus-cycle switcher now opens with quick fade/scale motion and animates between candidates with smoother carousel-style card movement.

Apogee across monitors

The new overview can open on every active monitor at once, improves preview capture scheduling, tightens hovered-window feedback, and avoids mutating the desktop until close animation finishes.

Apogee cluster preview

Apogee now always shows the field overview even with a cluster workspace open. Hovering or keyboard-focusing a cluster core dissolves its icon and expands in place into a live cluster viewport — master, stack, and overflow — so you can peek into a cluster without leaving the overview.

Keyboard-navigable Apogee

Apogee gains full keyboard navigation anchored on the last-focused window, so arrow-key selection stays oriented around where you came from instead of snapping back to the grid.

Cluster workspace animations

Opening a cluster cascades tiled members in from the left with a per-member stagger and tunes the stacking card grow-in; closing sucks each member into its core. A new animations.cluster block controls open and close timing per layout.

Inertial field zoom

Camera zoom now behaves like a powered lens, injecting velocity into log view-size space so repeated inputs accelerate and then coast with configurable friction.

Fullscreen and resize fixes

Fullscreen exits animate back to restored geometry, genuine exits restore the previous camera, and border resize handling gets clearer edge grabs, hover handles, and persistent raise behavior.

Maximize and fullscreen, exclusive

Maximize and fullscreen are now mutually exclusive per monitor: entering one exits the other, and a client unmaximize can no longer dismiss a user-initiated fullscreen. Both now ease the camera on the same fixed curve as the window grow and shrink, removing the asymptotic settle that made the zoom feel stuck near the end.

Nested on purpose

halley --nested explicitly launches the winit backend in a visible host window without replacing the session IPC socket or running full-session autostart.

Portal chooser overlay

Portal capture gets a Halley-native source chooser with monitor picking, window picking, direct single-source selection, and screenshot-style hovered-window highlighting.

Rendering stability

Blur rendering now captures the framebuffer at the right z-order, masks transparent layer-shell surfaces correctly, survives per-frame blur failures, and handles overlay-only frames.

GPU-accelerated clients and persistent shells

Halley now binds its EGL display to Wayland so GPU-accelerated clients (Quickshell, Qt/EGL, GL apps) get a server-side wl_drm and stop crashing with EGL_BAD_DISPLAY or EGL_BAD_SURFACE. Persistent layer-shell panels such as bars and launchers also no longer swallow hover-focus or clicks meant for the desktop behind them.

Game and Xwayland paths

SDL apps can fall back to X11/Xwayland again, RandR primary output state is more reliable, and fullscreen/popup behavior gets another round of Steam and game-focused fixes.

Games go fullscreen on launch

Game-like windows (steam_app_*, gamescope) now auto-fullscreen on top of whatever layout they joined once their app id arrives, mirroring what most games request via set_fullscreen anyway.

Installation

Get v0.5.0

AUR

AUR 
yay -S halley
AUR 
yay -S halley-full
AUR 
yay -S halley-lift

Development Version

dev package 
yay -S halley-git

From Source

source build 
git clone https://github.com/saltnpepper97/halley
cd halley
git checkout v0.5.0
cargo build --release

Notes

Still Growing

  • The wiki now defaults to v0.5.0 while v0.4.0 and earlier releases remain available from the version picker.
  • AUR packaging adds halley-git for the latest source build, halley-lift for the standalone command palette, and halley-full as the ecosystem bundle. For v0.5.0, halley-full installs Halley with Lift and selected first-party ecosystem pieces; future ecosystem apps such as Aperture will join halley-full while remaining individually installable.
  • Existing decorations.shadows config is migrated into effects.shadows by the updater, but the legacy key is no longer parsed after that move. New installs also get the background/gesso defaults for the animated builtin space shader.
  • Packaged portal configuration now prefers the new xdg-desktop-portal-halley backend for capture while GTK remains the fallback for other portal interfaces.

Thanks

To The Early Field

Thanks to everyone testing portals, OBS and Discord capture paths, Lift workflows, Apogee overview behavior, blur-heavy configs, nested compositor sessions, and touchpad gestures during the v0.5 cycle.

The reports around capture black frames, popup blur, icon stalls, Apogee previews, fullscreen restoration, and device behavior shaped this release directly.

Glass makes the field readable; gravity keeps it grounded.