An opinionated panel for Wayland made with iced.rs
https://codeberg.org/naomi/nanel

What the hell is a panel?

For anyone unfamiliar with the lingo, panels are the bits typically found at the edge of your screen - Windows calls this the taskbar. There are many alternative panels for people to use, be it the ones that ship in desktop environments like KDE, GNOME or COSMIC, or independent ones like Waybar, Sfwbar or Yambar (and Nanel!).

Why make another one?

I'm making Nanel as I personally don't think any other panel (that I know of at least) suits my needs. The panel I use at the moment of writing is xfce4-panel, but I still have grievances with it's behaviour, as well as it crashing fairly frequently. I also wanted to make a panel with a default config as close to a Windows-like experience as I can get, to make it easier for anyone migrating away from it.

Why Rust and iced.rs?

While I'm not the biggest fan of Rust, I still prefer it over writing C and C++, and I didn't want to use Qt or GTK or handroll my own system. iced.rs also uses the Elm architecture, which I am a big fan of, and has made iterating on Nanel very fast and easy.

Config language

I originally was using TOML as the config language, using the format below, which I was generally happy with.

position = "Top"
monitor = "All"
theme = "Default"

[[modules.left]]
name = "start_menu"

[[modules.left]]
name = "workspaces"

However I wasn't happy with how I had implemented it and the way that the modules were configured. After a while I decided to switch the configuration language to Ron, which has greatly improved the ergonomics of working with the config, and I think it's actually just a better format for this!

(
    position: Top,
    monitor: All,
    theme: Default,
    modules: (
        left: [
            StartMenu,
            Workspaces,
        ],
        middle: [],
        right: []
    )
)

Why can I do X but not Y?

As mentioned in the summary for this post, Nanel is an opinionated panel, meaning it will impose restrictions in places that not everyone will like. However, this doesn't mean that can't change - if you find something that you feel should be configurable, or the default behaviour should be different, open an issue with your reasoning!

When is v1?

I'm hoping to get v1 released by April, or at least a usable beta. This date could end up being later, as I do have other priorities that could overshadow this depending on what comes up. I will make another blog post when v1 does come out detailing Nanel's capabilities more.