The windowing compositor of NyxOS — the purple night-themed desktop, drawn from scratch.
Hemera — named for the primordial goddess of day, born of Nyx — is the desktop of NyxOS: the compositor that turns a raw framebuffer into a windowed environment. It draws every pixel itself, with no toolkit underneath.
It is double-buffered (each frame is composed off-screen and blitted in one shot, so there is never a half-drawn frame), and it owns the whole desktop: overlapping windows with drag, resize, minimise/maximise and z-order; a taskbar and a searchable start menu; desktop icons; a right-click context menu; an animated night-sky wallpaper; a screensaver; and even MouseKeys, so the pointer can be driven from the keyboard on hardware with no mouse.
The NyxOS desktop composed by Hemera — windows, taskbar, start menu and the night-sky wallpaper
- Compositor — off-screen back buffer + single-blit present (flicker-free); dirty-rect redraw; idle-yield so it doesn't busy-poll
- Window system — create/destroy, move, resize, minimise/maximise, focus and z-order; per-window draw / key / click callbacks
- Shell — taskbar with live task buttons and a clock; a start menu with type-to-search; draggable desktop icons; a context menu
- Look — a purple night theme, an animated starfield-and-moon wallpaper, and a boot splash
- Input — mouse, scroll wheel, and keyboard-driven MouseKeys for mouse-less machines
- 3D — a small software rasteriser (
tri.c/mat4.c) for the perspective HUDs and voxel demos
Hemera is the desktop layer of NyxOS. Today it is compiled into the kernel under kernel/gui/core/ and runs in ring 0; the next step is to graduate it into a standalone ring-3 ELF that talks to the kernel purely through the window syscalls. This repository holds a source snapshot (src/) of that component.
The apps that live on top of Hemera are their own components, each named for a deity of the night:
| Component | Repo | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Hemera | (here) | the compositor / desktop |
| Erebus | erebus | the terminal |
| Selene | selene | the web browser |
| Mnemosyne | mnemosyne | the text editor |
src/compositor.c— the compositor and window manager (the heart of Hemera)src/gui.c,src/theme.h,src/gfx_prims.h— drawing primitives and the night themesrc/wallpaper_win.c,src/bootsplash.c— the animated wallpaper and boot splashsrc/tri.c,src/mat4.c— the software 3D rasterisersrc/userwin.c— the ring-3 window registry (windows opened by user ELFs)
Built into the NyxOS kernel and running the desktop today; the standalone-ELF split is the roadmap.