feresaria

Ferese is a complete Wayland desktop built around personalization. Its custom shell, native settings, live-reloading themes and wallpapers, desktop widgets, fluid animations, and scrolling and tiling layouts work together as one cohesive experience—beautiful by default and unmistakably yours.

One cohesive desktop

Flexible layouts: scrolling columns, tree tiling, floating windows and a workspace overview.
A native shell: menu bar, control center, settings, notifications and desktop widgets designed to belong together, including themed authentication prompts.
Personal by design: themes, wallpapers, accent colors, blur, borders and motion that update without restarting your session.
Ready for real setups: gestures, multi-monitor support, fractional scaling, screenshots, background services and session locking.
Screen sharing: a native display picker and PipeWire video streams for portal-compatible recording and conferencing apps.

Make it yours

Use the native Settings app for everyday customization, or edit ~/.config/ferese/config.kdl when you want complete control. Ferese reloads changes as you make them and keeps the last working configuration if an edit is invalid.

Choose a preset or build your own look. Window behavior, gestures, shortcuts, rules, displays, widgets and login items are configurable too. Start with the configuration guide or the example config.

Install

Install Ferese on Linux with any Wayland-capable login manager, a command-based greeter, or a local TTY. Start with the installation guide for system dependencies and Rust 1.95 or newer, then build as your normal user:

git clone https://github.com/ferese-wm/ferese.git
cd ferese
./scripts/install.sh

Log out and select Ferese at your login screen. For greeters that take a session command, use /usr/local/bin/ferese-session. The installer preserves your configuration and other sessions, and retains the previous release for rollback. The guide covers all startup methods, optional tools, updates, and recovery.

To preview Ferese inside your current Wayland desktop instead:

cargo build --release --locked -p ferese -p ferese-shell -p ferese-settings -p feresectl -p ferese-lock
target/release/ferese --backend nested --grant-effects --grant-shell-control -- \
  target/release/ferese-shell

Get around

These are the built-in defaults; every shortcut and gesture can be changed.

Shortcut	Action
Super + Enter	Open a terminal
Super + H / J / K / L	Focus a window
Super + R	Cycle column width
Super + Tab	Open workspace and window overview
Super + M	Switch scrolling / tree layout
Super + Shift + S	Select a screenshot area

Click the bar date for a calendar. Click the battery for power modes and confirmed Restart, Power off and Suspend actions.

Three-finger swipes move between workspaces and windows. Open Control Center → Settings → Shortcuts to change them or assign gestures to other actions.

Documentation

Development

cargo test --workspace --locked
cargo fmt --all --check

Ferese is built in Rust on Smithay. Use release builds when evaluating motion and startup performance, and keep another desktop session available while testing hardware behavior.