Floatly

A tiny charm that hangs from the top of your screen on a rope and gently swings — a small delight, right on your Linux desktop.

swing-demo.mp4

It sways on its own like a wind chime (a damped pendulum with the occasional random "air current"), reacts to a click with a little push, and can be dragged left/right along the top edge. Everywhere except the rope and charm itself is click-through, so it never gets in the way of whatever's under it.

Requirements

• Linux with an X11 or XWayland-capable desktop (the widget runs as an XWayland client even under a Wayland compositor — see python-widget/README.md for why)
• uv for the widget
• Rust/cargo for the optional COSMIC panel applet

Quick start

cd python-widget
./run.sh

That's the whole widget: it installs its own dependencies into a local .venv on first run and hangs the charm from the top of your primary screen.

Project layout

This repo has two parts that work together:

Part	What it is	Docs
python-widget/	The hanging charm itself — a transparent, always-on-top PySide6 window	python-widget/README.md
applet/	A COSMIC panel icon (Rust + libcosmic) that opens the widget's Settings dialog	applet/README.md

The applet is optional: it's just a convenient panel launcher for the widget's Settings dialog on the COSMIC desktop. A panel applet can't draw a rope reaching down onto the desktop itself (it's confined to a small bar icon), which is why the two are separate processes, talking to each other through ~/.config/floatly/config.json.

If you're not on COSMIC, the widget still works completely standalone — run its Settings dialog directly with uv run floatly-settings from python-widget/, no applet needed.

Configuring

Settings (rope position, rope length, charm image, click-through) are edited live via:

cd python-widget
uv run floatly-settings

Changes are written to ~/.config/floatly/config.json, which the running widget watches and picks up instantly. See python-widget/README.md for details.

License

Not yet licensed — all rights reserved for now.