Services are the backend layer of ashell. They manage communication with system APIs and produce events that modules consume. Services have no UI.
| Service | Location | Backend | Protocol | Required Package |
|---|
| Compositor | services/compositor/ | Hyprland / Niri | IPC socket | Hyprland or Niri |
| Audio | services/audio.rs | PulseAudio | libpulse C library | PulseAudio or PipeWire-Pulse |
| Brightness | services/brightness.rs | sysfs + logind | File I/O + D-Bus | systemd-logind |
| Bluetooth | services/bluetooth/ | BlueZ | D-Bus | bluez |
| Network | services/network/ | NetworkManager / IWD | D-Bus | networkmanager or iwd |
| MPRIS | services/mpris/ | Media players | D-Bus | MPRIS-compatible player |
| Tray | services/tray/ | StatusNotifierItem | D-Bus | — |
| UPower | services/upower/ | UPower daemon | D-Bus | upower |
| Privacy | services/privacy.rs | PipeWire | PipeWire portals | pipewire |
| Idle Inhibitor | services/idle_inhibitor.rs | systemd-logind | D-Bus | systemd-logind |
| Logind | services/logind.rs | systemd-logind | D-Bus | systemd-logind |
| Throttle | services/throttle.rs | (utility) | Stream adapter | — |
| Aspect | Module | Service |
|---|
| Has UI | Yes (view()) | No |
| Interacts with system | No (consumes services) | Yes |
Has Message type | Yes | Has UpdateEvent + ServiceEvent |
| Defined by | Convention | ReadOnlyService / Service trait |
| Runs on | Main thread (iced event loop) | Async (tokio) or dedicated thread |
Service (async/background)
│
▼ ServiceEvent<S>
Module subscription
│
▼ Module::Message
App::update()
│
▼ Service::command() (for bidirectional services)
Service (executes command, returns result)
- Main thread: iced event loop + rendering
- Tokio runtime: Most services (D-Bus watchers, timers, IPC)
- Dedicated OS thread: PulseAudio mainloop (libpulse requires its own event loop)
- Communication:
tokio::sync::mpsc channels between threads, iced channel() for subscriptions