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.

The most burning question of them all. The short answer is that I simply do not wish to switch to AGS v2, due to a few reasons. The primary reason is that the documentation is still subpar, and the return for my investment will simply not be worth it. I have to migrate to Astal, and that means I have to rewrite most of my configuration. The now scattered documentation of AGS and Astal got on my nerves, and I imagine it has only gotten worse with v3.

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. RAGS is that public fork. Packagers may be inclined, but not particularly encouraged to update their packages.

Most of the time was spent modernizing the codebase. The Nix packages were simplified, and dependency resolution is now done with PNPM. While I was working with PNPM, I have went ahead and updateed some of the tooling (mainly ESLint and Typescript) to their latest versions to maybe leave more room for better linting, CI and automation in the future.

API reference and usage guides are available at the generated documentation site. Build it locally with pnpm docs, or see the docs/ directory for source files.

My main plan for RAGS, from the point of forking, has been to focus mostly but not exclusively to focus on performance and security. This is rather a side effect of keeping dependencies up to date, but I'll make a focucsed effort on optimizing this program since it is a critical component of my desktop systems.

I quite frankly do not intend, nor care, to add any new widgets or services as I do not have any need for them, however, I am ammendable to critical additions that make the RAGS experience better without degrading maintainability.

What I really want to achieve with this repository is to have the codebse age well, without bitrotting over time and avoiding conflicts due to changing toolchain and dependencies. This usually has good security implications, and I care deeply about the security of a program that can run arbitrary Javascript on my system.

As a final note, I would like to add a dash of Rust or Zig to this codebase to perhaps modernize the primary interface a little. Since we interact mainly with GTK and use bindings, this could also make RAGS evolve into its own thing over time and reduce some of the maintenance burden due to the removal of a layer of abstraction.

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 v3.0, following upstream license. Please respect the original author if forking this repository.