GitHub - skorotkiewicz/rudo: A small, elegant dock for Wayland

A small, elegant dock for Wayland.

rudo is built for a clean desktop: pinned apps, live running windows, gentle autohide, and simple user configuration. It is designed to feel at home on niri, while still working with other Wayland compositors that expose the right protocols.

Features

Wayland-first dock UI with GTK4 + layer-shell
Persistent pinned apps
Running window tracking
Launch feedback to prevent double-click spam
Configurable menu system — power menu, custom actions, confirmations
Multi-monitor placement — show the dock on the first or every connected output
Manual --toggle, --show, and --hide commands
Optional autohide with hover-to-reveal
User theming via CSS
Live-reloading behavior settings via JSON

Compositor Support

niri: best experience, using NIRI_SOCKET integration
Other Wayland compositors: works through wlr-foreign-toplevel-management when available

Feature Availability by Backend

Feature	niri	wlr-foreign-toplevel
Window tracking	✅ Full	✅ Full
Activation/close	✅ Full	✅ Full

Build

Or with just:

Run

Or:

Running rudo again shows the existing dock instead of creating another one. Visibility can be controlled from scripts or compositor key bindings:

rudo --toggle
rudo --show
rudo --hide

Install

From AUR (Arch Linux)

For Arch Linux users, rudo is available in the AUR as rudo-bin:

yay -S rudo-bin
# or
paru -S rudo-bin

This installs the pre-built binary. No compilation needed.

Configuration

rudo stores its user files in ~/.config/rudo/.

pins.json: pinned applications
settings.json: behavior settings
style.css: visual overrides

Default settings.json:

{
  "autohide": {
    "enabled": true,
    "delay_secs": 3
  },
  "show_pin_button": true,
  "icon_size": 24,
  "position": "bottom",
  "outputs": "first",
  "animation_duration_ms": 220,
  "menu": {
    "enabled": false,
    "icon": "system-lock-screen-symbolic",
    "position": "end",
    "items": [
      {"label": "Lock", "icon": "system-lock-screen-symbolic", "command": "swaylock -f", "confirm": false},
      {"label": "Logout", "icon": "system-log-out-symbolic", "command": "loginctl terminate-user $USER", "confirm": true},
      {"label": "Restart", "icon": "system-restart-symbolic", "command": "systemctl reboot", "confirm": true},
      {"label": "Shutdown", "icon": "system-shutdown-symbolic", "command": "systemctl poweroff", "confirm": true}
    ]
  }
}

position: "bottom", "top", "left", "right"
outputs: "first" for one dock or "all" for one dock on every connected monitor
icon_size: Size in pixels (default: 24)
animation_duration_ms: Show/hide animation in milliseconds (default: 220)

Settings and monitor changes are applied while Rudo is running. Every dock view shares the same pins and global window list; filtering windows by their current output is not yet supported by the available backends.

Menu System

Configure a power menu or custom actions via the menu section:

enabled: Show/hide the menu button
icon: Icon name for the menu button (default: system-lock-screen-symbolic)
position: "start" (before pins) or "end" (after running apps)
items: Array of menu items with label, command, optional icon, and confirm flag

Set confirm: true to show a confirmation dialog before executing destructive commands.

style.css is loaded on every start after the built-in theme, so you can override the dock without rebuilding.

Autostart (niri)

The GitHub release archive includes rudo.service. The rudo-bin AUR package installs it as a systemd user unit, but leaves activation to the user. Enable and start it with:

systemctl --user enable --now rudo.service

If you installed Rudo manually from the release archive, install the binary and unit first:

sudo install -Dm755 rudo /usr/local/bin/rudo
install -Dm644 rudo.service ~/.config/systemd/user/rudo.service
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now rudo.service

Niri starts graphical-session.target, which starts Rudo and stops it again with the graphical session. Remove any existing spawn-at-startup "rudo" entry before enabling the service.

Alternatively, add Rudo directly to your niri config:

// ~/.config/niri/config.kdl
spawn-at-startup "rudo"

binds {
    Mod+D { spawn "rudo" "--toggle"; }
}

Development

Status

rudo is intentionally small. The codebase is structured to stay easy to change as more dock behavior is added over time.