glint

A complete desktop environment for Windows, in the spirit of KDE Plasma or GNOME — but native. glint keeps the Windows kernel, driver stack, and DWM compositor, and replaces everything above the compositor that makes a desktop a desktop: the bar, the launcher, the notification and quick-settings surfaces, the desktop, the session controls, and the settings.

No Electron, no WebView, no bundled Chromium. The shell renders on Direct2D / DirectWrite / DirectComposition and talks to Win32 directly, so it starts instantly and idles in tens of megabytes.

Status: pre-swap. The shell runs today alongside Explorer for daily dogfooding; the milestone that flips Winlogon\Shell to make glint the resident shell (M7) is gated on the checklist in docs/SHELL_DESIGN.md.

Workspace

glint is a Cargo workspace of four crates. The desktop environment is glide-shell; the others are the launcher and file-manager it drives.

Crate	Role
glide-shell	The desktop environment — taskbar, system tray, Start menu, desktop + icons, notification center, quick settings, OSDs, per-monitor secondary bar, a control-center settings app, and a native task manager. Full shell-replacement safety ladder included.
glide	Dual-pane, Win11-native file manager — the Explorer challenger.
glint	Unified launcher for files, apps, and the web.
glint-core	Shared Win11-native building blocks (icon extraction, platform shims, search sources).

What glide-shell ships

• Taskbar — appbar-registered bottom bar with running-window buttons, pinned apps imported from Explorer's own taskbar pins, a live system tray (full Shell_NotifyIcon / appbar relay protocol), clock, and a floating rounded-panel design language.
• Start menu — apps enumerated from shell:AppsFolder, pinned tiles, power controls (lock / sleep / restart / shutdown).
• Desktop — wallpaper, icons, and mouse drag-and-drop arrangement.
• Notifications & Quick Settings — a Win10-style notification center driven by UserNotificationListener, plus a quick-settings flyout (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, airplane) and volume / brightness OSDs.
• Dual-screen — a per-monitor secondary bar (built for the ASUS Zenbook Duo).
• Settings — a glide-rendered control center: personalization, taskbar, startup programs, Windows tweaks, sound / power / network / apps / date-time controls rendered inline (not thrown back to ms-settings:), with true admin consoles kept as launchers.
• Task Manager — a native process/service manager modelled on the Windows 11 view: per-application groups by product name, app icons, live search, CPU/memory heat bars, and terminate / kill-tree / suspend / resume / priority.
• Safety — a crash-loop ladder that restores the Explorer shell and drops a rescue account before glint can lock you out.

Building

Requires a recent stable Rust (the workspace is edition 2024) and the Windows 10/11 SDK toolchain.

# the whole workspace
cargo build --release

# just the desktop environment
cargo build -p glide-shell --release

Run the shell alongside Explorer (safe — it stacks above the stock bar and never touches Winlogon\Shell):

target/release/glide-shell.exe

Standalone windows for development:

glide-shell.exe --settings    # the control-center settings app
glide-shell.exe --taskmgr     # the native task manager

Turning glint into the resident shell is a deliberate, reversible step — --register / --unregister manage the Winlogon\Shell swap, and the crash ladder self-restores Explorer. Do not swap until you have read docs/SHELL_DESIGN.md.

Design & log

• docs/SHELL_DESIGN.md — the architecture, the shell protocols (appbar / tray / shell hook), the safety model, and the milestone plan.
• docs/DEVLOG.md — running development log, newest first.

License

No license is granted. The source is public for reading; all rights are reserved. If you want to use any of it, open an issue and ask.