r/COSMICDE

Hello everyone,

I’ve been daily driving PopOS with COSMIC and wanted a quick way to see usage/reset state for the AI coding tools I use most: Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor

I built YapCap panel applet after trying some existing tools that didn’t integrate nicely with COSMIC on my setup. It reads local credentials/session cookies, shows cached data on startup, and refreshes in the background.

I use it daily and it has been working nicely for me, but it’s still early, so I’m looking for feedback.

• does it install cleanly?
• does it appear in the panel applet picker?
• does Cursor cookie import work with your browser/profile setup

GitHub link:
https://github.com/TopiCsarno/yapcap

OK OK I added a screen capcture: https://imgur.com/a/J6y9ywt it is smooth in reality the screengrab makes it choppy...

One of the biggest things I missed coming from GNOME was the smooth transition when opening the Activities overview — windows scaling and moving into place instead of snapping instantly. So I built it for COSMIC.

What it does:

• Windows animate from their actual desktop positions to the overview grid, with both position and size interpolated
• Reverse animation on close — windows fly back to where they'll be on the desktop
• Ease-out cubic easing at 120fps
• Focused window stays on top during the transition
• Tab/Shift+Tab to cycle through windows with a bounce-scale highlight effect
• Enter to activate the selected window (keyboard-only navigation)
• Transparent backgrounds so your wallpaper shows through
• Configurable duration via cosmic-config (animation_duration_ms)

How it works under the hood: Uses the existing ext-foreign-toplevel Wayland protocol's geometry events to get each window's real desktop position, then interpolates in the Toplevels iced widget layout. SSD decoration offsets are auto-detected by comparing geometry to the screencopy capture dimensions. All rendering stays on the GPU via the existing wgpu pipeline — no software blits added.

Try it out:

PR: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-workspaces-epoch/pull/299

# Clone my fork
git clone --branch feat/overview-animation https://github.com/jibsta210/cosmic-workspaces-epoch.git
cd cosmic-workspaces-epoch


# Build release binary (takes a few minutes)
cargo build --release


# Back up the original and install the patched version
sudo cp /usr/bin/cosmic-workspaces /usr/bin/cosmic-workspaces.bak
sudo cp target/release/cosmic-workspaces /usr/bin/cosmic-workspaces
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/cosmic-workspaces


# Restart the overview (it'll auto-respawn with the new binary)
pkill -f cosmic-workspaces

To adjust animation speed (default 250ms):

echo 400 > ~/.config/cosmic/com.system76.CosmicWorkspaces/v1/animation_duration_ms

To revert:

sudo cp /usr/bin/cosmic-workspaces.bak /usr/bin/cosmic-workspaces
# or reinstall the package: sudo apt install --reinstall cosmic-workspaces-epoch

Prerequisites: Rust toolchain (rustup or your distro's rust/cargo package) and the COSMIC dev dependencies. If the build fails, check the Cargo.toml for what you need — typically libwayland, libxkbcommon, mesa dev headers.

Heads up: Every time cosmic-workspaces-epoch gets a package update, you'll need to rebuild and reinstall. Source stays in ~/cosmic-workspaces-epoch so just git pull && cargo build --release && sudo cp target/release/cosmic-workspaces /usr/bin/.

Not sure if System76 will merge this — their PR template warns about AI-assisted contributions, which this was (I'm not a Rust dev, worked with Claude to implement it). But it works great on my machine across multiple display scale factors, and I wanted to share in case anyone else wants to try it or iterate on it.

Also built: a feature to hide individual system tray icons (similar to the GNOME Lilypad extension) — PR pending at https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-applets

I liked Cosmic but always preferred Mint underpinnings to Pop_OS!

Followed the simple steps here to add Cosmic to Mint XFCE : https://itsfoss.com/install-cosmic-de-ubuntu/

Then a bit of Cosmic tweaking and wallaper is from here: https://itsfoss.com/install-cosmic-de-ubuntu/

We got cosmic apples now already let's gooo

Wanted to share a native libcosmic applet I've been building so I can keep an eye on my system sensors without leaving the COSMIC panel. It's called vitals-cosmic, and it's a companion applet inspired by Vitals, the original JavaScript GNOME Shell extension by CoreCoding. I started from that JS/GJS source and reworked the client side into Rust for COSMIC/libcosmic, while keeping the sensor/backend model aligned with the rest of the Vitals ecosystem. The result is a native COSMIC applet instead of a repackaged GNOME extension.

Repo: vitals-cosmic
License: BSD-3-Clause

What it does

A row of (icon value) chips in the panel for CPU, memory, temperature, fans, voltage, storage, network, battery, and GPU. Click the applet to open a category popup with all 10 sensor groups. Hover a sensor row for a sparkline plus min / avg / max / last summary. Star any sensor to pin it onto the panel chip row, and it persists across restarts. There’s also a preferences sub-popup for update interval, precision, temperature unit, memory/storage units, and monitor command.

Why not just repackage the GNOME extension?

Most existing Vitals ports drag a GTK runtime along for the ride. I wanted something that themes and sizes like the rest of the COSMIC panel, using the same button::custom + widget::autosize::autosize recipe as cosmic-applet-time, symbolic icons tinted from the active COSMIC theme’s foreground color, D-Bus session auto-activation, and no GTK at all. It’s a single ~20 MiB Rust binary built against libcosmic/iced.

The original Vitals project is a GNOME Shell extension implemented in JavaScript/GJS, with files like extension.js, prefs.js, menuItem.js, sensors.js, and values.js in the repository. My applet takes that concept and rewrites the frontend/client layer in Rust for COSMIC, rather than trying to wrap or rehost the GNOME extension directly. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

The sensor backend is shared with vitals-rs, so the Fedora GTK4 app, the GNOME Shell extension, and this applet all talk to the same vitals-daemon over session D-Bus. Config round-trips through the daemon’s SetConfig RPC, so ~/.config/vitals/config.toml stays canonical across every client. If you hop between COSMIC and GNOME, your pinned sensors and unit prefs follow you.

What's working

• Panel chip row with star-to-pin
• Category popup with all 10 sensor groups
• Preferences sub-popup
• Hover history (Unicode sparkline + stats)
• Daemon-unreachable state with a Retry button
• Rust 2024 edition, clean release build (LTO + stripped)
• Skeleton Gentoo ebuild at gentoo/app-admin/vitals-cosmic/

What's still rough

• No i18n yet (the GNOME extension has 20 languages; I have zero)
• No drag-to-reorder on pinned sensors
• Hover graph is a Unicode sparkline placeholder; a proper iced canvas::Program line graph is a follow-up once I pin a libcosmic commit
• Only been daily-driven on Gentoo + COSMIC so far. If you run it on Pop!_OS, Fedora, or Arch, I’d really love a bug report either way.