Workspace OSD Flash

A DankMaterialShell daemon plugin that briefly shows the id and name of the workspace you just switched to, centered on that screen.

Features

• Centered card with the workspace number and, if it has one, its name
• Small list underneath with the windows open on that workspace, one per line as App · Window title (or grouped app names), folding the rest into +N more
• Shown on the screen whose workspace changed, so it works per monitor
• Quick switching never queues: a new switch replaces the text immediately
• Fades and shrinks out after a configurable hold time
• Click-through overlay, never steals focus or input
• Styled like DMS's own OSDs: theme colours, corner radius, popup transparency, elevation shadow, blur and blur border, font family and size, animation speed, light/dark mode
• Configurable from the DMS settings UI: hold time, fade duration, text size, name on/off, label style, position
• Translatable; ships with Dutch

Requirements

• DankMaterialShell >= 1.6.0 (uses the plugin translation API introduced in 1.6.0)
• Hyprland or niri
  • Hyprland: tested
  • niri: best effort, implemented against the DMS niri service but not tested yet. Feedback welcome.

A startup check refuses to enable the plugin on other compositors and shows the reason as a toast.

Install

From the plugin registry

DMS Settings (Mod + ,) → Plugins → Browse → Workspace OSD Flash, or:

dms plugins install workspaceOsdFlash

Update later with dms plugins update workspaceOsdFlash; remove with dms plugins uninstall workspaceOsdFlash.

Manual

git clone https://github.com/AleBles/dms-workspace-osd \
  ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/workspace-osd-flash
dms restart

Then enable it in DMS Settings → Plugins → Workspace OSD Flash, or run dms ipc call plugins enable workspaceOsdFlash.

Clone rather than symlink: with a symlinked plugin directory Qt refuses to load the startup check (File name case mismatch in the DMS log). DMS then skips the check and loads the plugin anyway, so this only matters for development setups.

Settings

Setting	Default	Notes
Hold time	700 ms	Time before the fade-out starts
Fade-out duration	follows DMS	Set a value in ms to override the DMS animation speed
Accent border	on	Thin primary-coloured ring on top of the DMS surface
Text size	44 px	The card scales with the text
Show workspace name	on	Include the name when the workspace has one
List open windows	on	One small line per window under the label
App lines show	Window titles	App · Title, or app names grouped with a count
App lines alignment	Left	Left-aligned block under the label, or centered lines
Max characters per line	100	Longer lines are cut with an ellipsis, 0 disables
Max lines	6	Further windows fold into +N more
Label style	Workspace 2: work	Also 2 · work and name-only
Position	center	Center, top or bottom of the screen

Naming workspaces

On Hyprland the DMS rename dialog (Ctrl + Shift + R by default) stores the name as <id> <name>. The plugin strips the duplicated id, so a workspace renamed to work shows as Workspace 2: work.

On niri the number shown is the workspace's index on its output, the same number the DMS bar shows.

IPC

Other tools can flash a message on a screen. Quickshell IPC requires every argument, so pass "" for the ones you do not need:

dms ipc call wsosd flash "Hello" "DP-1" "line one | line two"   # text, monitor ("" = all screens), lines ("" = none)
dms ipc call wsosd flash "Hello" "" ""
dms ipc call wsosd hide

Translations

The plugin ships Dutch (translations/nl.json); the English strings in the QML files are the source. DMS picks the file matching the shell locale automatically.

To add a language, create translations/<locale>.json (de.json, zh_CN.json, ...) with one bucket per English term:

{
  "Hold time": { "Hold time": "Anzeigedauer" }
}

Untranslated terms fall back to English. Reload with dms ipc call plugins reload workspaceOsdFlash and switch the language under DMS Settings → Locale to check. Pull requests with new languages are welcome.

License

MIT