RAGS is a fork of Aylur's GTK Shell (AGS), based on the last available v1 tag. This project exists primarily due to the fact that I simply do not care about the new features, and remain inconvenienced by the prospect of migrating to v2. I also find the new syntax wildly unintuitive, so migration is simply non-ideal.

The purpose of this fork is to keep AGS v1 usable. I will focus primarily on performance and security, as well as packaging. The goal is to avoid bitrot with as few feature additions as possible. That said, I am open to feature requests or even pull requests if you wish to stick to v1, but have certain (minor) gripes that are annoying you.

(R)AGS is a library built for GJS to allow defining GTK widgets in a declarative way. It also provides services and other utilities to interact with the system so that these widgets can have functionality. GJS is a JavaScript runtime built on Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and the GNOME platform libraries, the same runtime GNOME Shell runs on.

I simply do not wish to switch to AGS v2. The documentation is still subpar, and the now scattered documentation for AGS and Astal started getting on my nerves while trying to migrate. As such I want to continue using v1, but also ensure that it remains usable for the duration I continue using it. Maybe you are in a similar position, and could benefit from a public fork.

My main plans for RAGS is to focus solely on performance and security. I will add no new widgets, as I have no need for them. What I really want to do is to make sure that the codebase ages well, and maybe even add a dash of Rust (likely via WASM) wherever it may provide performance or maintainability benefits.

You'll probably want to package RAGS for your distribution if you're looking to use it yourself. I only support Nix, but you may PR package manifests (PKGBUILDs, RPMs, etc.) if you're interested in using RAGS. I will not reject such PRs, and might make an effort to support legacy FHS distributions in the future.

For now, here's a general guide you'll want to follow:

meson setup builddir
meson compile -C builddir

The main binary will be available at builddir/src/com.github.Aylur.ags. You can rename it to whatever you want the binary to be called.

To install it system-wide:

meson install -C builddir

Building RAGS requires the following dependencies to be available in your system:

• meson, ninja
• typescript
• pkg-config
• gobject-introspection
• gjs
• gtk3
• libpulseaudio
• And various other GNOME libraries (see nix/package.nix for complete list)

If you're using Nix, the default dev shell can be used to build RAGS with Meson without invoking nix build.

First and foremost, I thank Aylur for creating such an extensive framework. It has been serving me well for over a year, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The original AGS was heavily inspired by EWW, and as such I extend my thanks to EWW as well.

RAGS is released under GPL v3 following upstream license. Please respect the original author if forking this repository.