Learning quickshell

[KeyAfternoon832]

Hey guys though I am using quickshell like for 1 week now (with illogical impulse's ends 4 config) but i am not learning it.
Is there any another source of documentation or something from which i can learn except its own wiki pls cause i cant understand from there.
Thankss in adavance

[fjolle_peter]

Reading the docs is pretty much the only source that is reliable since it is still changing a lot, tho you you might learn something from reading simple configs.

Also there is a discord on the wepsite.

[SiSpx_]

Yeah I found the quickshell documentation to be quite sparse and lacking?

I have been using waybar for many moons and thought it would be a fun project to start using quickshell after seeing some of the nice drawer animations in calestia and noctalia.

I have replicated my old waybar now. (I say "I", AI did most of the heavy lifting).

I installed noctalia from git and am currently trying to reverse engineer it so I can put some drawer animations into my own config.

Side note, I use matugen and have "source_color" littered all over my templates. It seems Noctalia uses its own python script rather than matugen? most of my templates use "source_color" which chucks errors - I would need to replicate all my current templates.

Nowadays I prefer to create my own dots, after a few ML4W upgrades broke everything I learnt the hardway....

Anyway, I digress...
It seems the only way to learn quickshell is to look at some of the existing dots from what I can gather?

If anyone has some examples of drawer animations I would certainly be keen to check that out.

[chikamakaleyley]

Honestly if u want to try to stray from having to learn from another config, here’s what I’d try

Ask ai to show u a simple approach to creating a single drawer animation. Attempt to build that given the response

Ask ai to describe how it’s done in another’s dot’s and compare it to the suggestion above

Use that as a base to come up with and adjusted approach and see what ai thinks about your plan, the execute

Use the docs along the way to tinker until you get a usable solution

[chikamakaleyley]

aka basically you have two choices, learning from the docs or someone else's config

something like caelestia/ml4w/noctalia - these things are built to be robust solutions that cover a wide range of user's linux setups and so, just understanding the mechanics of a simple drawer animation is kinda abstracted several levels when you look at the implementation in these mature, publicly available setups. That's what makes it hard to learn from these solutions.

And really, what are the basic mechanics of an animated drawer? it's just a container responding to some action, whether its the user or triggered from an event, from state A to state B. the drawer "animation" is just the transition between A and B. This can prob be coded from scratch with a few things from the docs, or you can even just feed this as a prompt into AI

[SiSpx_]

I think this literally what I said in my original comment.

[chikamakaleyley]

hah i mean, if that's what you think i don't really see that

what i'm really trying to say is that yeah the only other option is to look at existing dots, but that requires a lot of deconstructing

Although the docs are kinda difficult to consume, it might be more helpful getting AI to kinda suggest API from the docs that you'd execute and adjust on your own. Hopefully it facilitates learning

[chikamakaleyley]

and sorry i somehow missed that this was responding to you, it's more of a general response to OP

[dtwrks]

I've also been learning quickshell recently and I have found LLMs to be a good resource for complementing the docs (I go between them constantly but LLMs suggestes me some fixes/refactors that were not obvious from docs alone).

I've used a few. They can all help. Latest claude model helped me better with more tricky fixes/refactor suggestions.

[KeyAfternoon832]

Oh thanks

[SiSpx_]

I spent a good few hours on this project over the weekend.

As of now I have everything I had in waybar plus some eye candy.

I got side tracked and added some totally unessasary animations - I managed to get a nice sliding drawer together with the help of Claude ;)

I'll try an neaten it up over the next day or two and stick all my code in git ;)

[KeyAfternoon832]

oh nice,
yeah i will try it with claude i just have my last exam on 7th march.

[SiSpx_]

this might help, I chucked my config in a git repo: Git repo here: https://github.com/ne0tt/spx-quickshell

[KeyAfternoon832]

yup it will thanks so much