veil

Version: v2.0.0 Status: Flagship Stable Author: viewerofall

Veil is a high-performance Wayland compositor built to run standalone on bare TTYs or nested inside existing terminals and compositors. Features dwindle tiling, full input integration, bidirectional clipboard sync, and direct GPU hardware rendering.

Quick Install (Arch Linux / AUR)

yay -S veil-host-bin velogin-bin

Key Features

Dwindle Tiling

Dynamic 2×2 grid layout. Resize, swap, rotate splits with Super keybinds.

Kitty Graphics

Pixel-perfect rendering via Kitty Graphics Protocol on Kitty and WezTerm.

32MB Memory Footprint

Ultra-lean RAM consumption built on Smithay & Rust.

DRM/KMS Output

Direct TTY framebuffer rendering without requiring a terminal emulator.

Multi-Compositor Nesting

Run Niri and Hyprland simultaneously as separate nested windows.

GPU Pipeline

Vulkan GPU compute shader encoding for low-latency rendering.

Installation

Curl Script (Recommended)

curl -fsSL https://viewerofall.pages.dev/install/veil/install.sh | bash

Manual Download

curl -fsSL https://github.com/viewerofall/veil/releases/download/v2.0.0/veil-host-x86_64.tar.gz | tar xz
sudo install -m755 veil-host /usr/local/bin/

Usage & Keybinds

# Launch an app inside Veil
veil-host run firefox

# Append another app to running compositor instance
veil-host append nautilus

Keybindings

Keybind	Action
`Super + H / J / K / L`	Focus left / down / up / right
`Super + = / -`	Resize window (grow / shrink)
`Super + S`	Swap focused window
`Super + R`	Rotate split axis
`Super + Q`	Exit Veil
`Ctrl + C`	Terminate active app

Abyss (Velogin) Login Manager

Graphical TTY login manager running on bare DRM/KMS with PAM auth and session management.

sudo systemctl enable seatd.service
sudo systemctl disable getty@tty1.service
sudo systemctl enable abyss.service

Architecture

App (Firefox, Nautilus, etc.)
  ↓ Wayland Protocol
veil-host (Smithay compositor)
  ├─ Dwindle layout engine
  ├─ GPU compute pipeline (wgpu Vulkan)
  └─ DRM/KMS or Terminal escape rendering

Configuration

Create ~/.config/veil/config.lua:

keybinds = {
  mod_key = "super",
  focus_left  = "h",
  focus_right = "l",
  focus_up    = "k",
  focus_down  = "j",
  quit = "q",
}
render_mode = "auto"
gpu_encode = true

Roadmap

done Dwindle tiling & DRM/KMS framebuffer
done GPU compute shader pipeline
planned Floating windows & interactive shell prompt
planned App launcher & workspace sidebar