← Otto User GuideDesktop Tour

A guided walk through everything Otto puts on screen, and what each piece is for.

The screen at a glance

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│ Firefox  File  Edit  View    (notifications)  🔊 🔋  Mar 23, 21:16   │  ← Top bar + Dynamic island
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│              │  🦊  📁  🎵  │  ▫ ▫ ▫                │                │  ← Dock
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The Dock

The strip along the bottom edge — or down the left or right edge, if you move it there. It is part of the compositor, not a separate app.

It holds three groups, in order along the dock: bookmarked launchers (apps you pinned in the config), running applications, and minimized windows.

A running app carries a small dot under its icon.
Icons magnify as the pointer approaches, macOS-style.
Hovering an icon shows its name in a label beside it.
Clicking a running app raises and focuses it; clicking again cycles through that app’s windows. Clicking a bookmark launches it, or focuses the existing instance.
An icon bounces while a launch is in progress, so you know the click registered before the window appears.
Clicking a minimized window restores it with the genie animation.
Right-clicking an icon opens a menu — open the app, quit it, or keep it in the dock. Dragging an icon along the dock reorders it.
An icon can carry a badge: the count of notifications that app has outstanding, published by the dynamic island.

The dock can auto-hide, move to either side edge, and have its size and magnification changed — from the config, from Settings, or by right-clicking its handle. See Dock.

The Top Bar (`otto-bar`)

A full-width panel pinned to the top edge of the primary monitor, with frosted glass blur and rounded bottom corners. Three zones:

Left — the focused application’s name, followed by its global menu (File, Edit, View …) when the app exports one over DBusMenu. Click a title to drop the menu down; arrow keys navigate, Enter activates, Escape closes.
Center — deliberately empty. This is where the dynamic island lives.
Right — system tray icons (StatusNotifierItem) and the clock.

Tray icons respond to left-click (context menu), right-click (activate, usually raising the app’s window) and middle-click (secondary activate). Hovering shows a tooltip.

The bar is a normal Wayland client. Start it from exec_once. See Top Bar.

The Dynamic Island (`otto-islands`)

Notification bubbles at the top-centre. At rest it draws nothing — the centre of the bar is empty and clicks pass through. It appears to show:

Notifications. Otto Islands is a full org.freedesktop.Notifications daemon, so ordinary desktop notifications land here. Each one is its own bubble; bubbles from the same app overlap into a deck.
Live activities — anything a program submits over D-Bus, such as a running build or a backup.
Permission dialogs — the screen-sharing consent prompt and output pickers render as an interactive island panel.

Brightness and volume changes are not shown here; they get their own indicator drawn by the compositor.

A new notification arrives already open so you can read it, then settles into a mini circle. Click a circle to grow it to a pill, click again to open it fully. See Dynamic Island.

Windows

Otto is a stacking window manager, not a tiling one. Windows are freely positioned and overlap.

New windows are placed where they overlap existing windows the least, rather than cascading from the corner. Maximize and fullscreen are animated; minimize uses a genie effect that sucks the window into its dock icon.

Decorations depend on what the application asks for. One that requests client-side decorations — GTK and Electron apps do — keeps drawing its own title bar. One that expresses no preference is told server-side and gets Otto’s own title bar, window controls and resize borders. See Window Management.

Workspaces

Each monitor has its own independent set of workspaces. Switching is animated — the whole workspace slides horizontally. Drive it with Ctrl+1…Ctrl+4, or a three-finger horizontal swipe.

Exposé

Press PageUp (or swipe up with three fingers) and every window on the current workspace scales down into a packed grid, each labeled with its title. Hover to highlight, click to focus, or drag a preview onto a workspace thumbnail to move the window there.

Above the grid sits the workspace selector: a strip of live workspace previews with a + button to add a workspace and an × on hover to remove one. The strip follows you to whichever monitor the pointer is on.

PageDown runs show desktop instead, pushing all windows off-screen to reveal the wallpaper.

The App Switcher

Ctrl+Tab brings up a horizontal panel of running applications with icons, names and a blurred backdrop. Hold Ctrl and tap Tab to walk forward, Ctrl+Shift+Tab to walk back, Ctrl+` to cycle windows within the highlighted app, and Ctrl+Q to quit it. Release Ctrl to commit.

The panel appears on whichever monitor the pointer is on. See Exposé & App Switcher.

The Lock Screen

Ctrl+Alt+Escape, the power button, closing the lid, or an idle timeout hides the session behind otto-lock: a centered authentication panel that accepts your password or a registered fingerprint. The session underneath is untouched and comes back exactly as you left it. See Lock Screen.

What is not on screen

Some things Otto does not have: a window list or workspace switcher in the top bar (that is the dock’s and exposé’s job), and per-monitor docks or top bars — both are primary-monitor-only for now. Configuration does have a GUI: otto-settings edits the running compositor over D-Bus, and the TOML file stays authoritative underneath it.