Ax-Less

The NothingLess feature set, ported into Ambxst as a single mod.

Ambxst is axtremely customisable. NothingLess diverged from it and grew a launcher, an agent platform, a wallpaper engine and more. Ax-Less brings that work back, as a mod, without forking the shell.

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One package, everything in it

There is exactly one package: axless.core. It declares no dependencies and needs nothing outside the Ambxst tree. Four features came out of this port; the rest were fixes to things NothingLess assumed that Ambxst does differently, documented so the reasoning survives.

	Feature	What it does
	AI agent platform	Register agents over MCP, HTTP or shell commands; their tools are merged into what the model sees.
	Compositor & monitors	A compositor menu that shows only what the running compositor supports, plus a drag-canvas monitor manager.
	Wallpaper engine	GPU frame interpolation and crossfade transitions between wallpapers.
	Hax launcher	NothingLess's spotlight, as an alternative to the stock notch launcher.

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AI agent platform

The assistant stops being a chat box with one hardcoded tool and becomes an agent host. You register agents; each advertises its own tools; the tools discovered from every connected agent are merged into the request the model sees.

• Three transports — MCP over stdio, an HTTP bridge, and command agents.
• Three adapters ship in the mod — NothingClaw, a self-driving agent loop that drives any OpenAI-compatible model; an OpenCode adapter for the opencode serve API; and an OpenClaw adapter that calls the official openclaw agent CLI.
• A reworked engine — correct OpenAI tool_calls / role: "tool" shaping, a capability probe that asks the model what it can do instead of guessing from its name, chain nudge and step budgets, a text tool-call fallback for small models, and runaway-stream guards so a stuck model cannot hang the chat for twenty minutes.

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Compositor panel & monitors

• The compositor settings menu shows only what the running compositor supports. On niri that is the Ambxst TOML sections plus monitors; on Hyprland the 73 extra NothingLess settings appear and write through hyprctl keyword. On niri there is no keyword interface, so those are hidden rather than shown dead.
• A monitor manager with a logical-pixel drag canvas, edge snapping, overlap resolution and per-output error reporting. Writes go straight to the compositor's own IPC (niri msg output, hyprctl keyword monitor), runtime only — nothing writes a compositor config file.
• Positions are remembered across compositor restarts and re-applied at startup, per output, for whatever compositor is running.

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Video wallpaper engine

• GPU frame interpolation. A Video element is decoded through a shader-based interpolator that synthesises the frames the source never had, using the motion vectors the decoder already produces. A Go helper (axvideo) can pre-render an interpolated clip for heavy sources, and axprobe reads the real frame rate so the blend interval matches the source.
• Crossfade transitions. Changing the wallpaper crossfades between old and new with a gentle zoom, ported from NothingLess's two-layer design: each layer holds its own source and the fade only starts once the incoming layer reports its content is ready — so it works for images, GIFs and video alike, with a safety timeout for formats that never signal readiness.
• A toggle and an x2 – x5 multiplier in the wallpapers tab drive the interpolator.

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Hax launcher

The launcher can be the stock notch launcher or Hax, chosen from Settings → Shell → Notch. Hax is NothingLess's own SpotlightView.qml, ported essentially unchanged: a spotlight pill that grows from the top of the screen, opened by the same keybind.

It brings application search, an inline calculator, > command mode, custom shortcuts, system actions, the plugin system, file search, quick look, clipboard / OCR / dictionary modes, timers and alarms, and a weather lookup. Its animations follow Ambxst's own Config.animDuration and easing, so it moves like the rest of the shell.

What changed in the port

Only the differences Ambxst forces: the per-screen Visibilities.spotlight module does not exist, so visibility rides on GlobalStates.haxVisible; the standalone self-quit was removed; a Config.hax section was added; CloseButton was ported with its animation references translated; the plugin directory moved under ~/.config/ambxst. The package manager was not ported — the original ships a hardcoded sudo password.

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Smaller pieces

• Dashboard task board — a fourth dashboard tab (F5) with a kanban board and a calendar view, backed by TodoBoard.qml.
• Per-monitor shell positions — the bar, dock and notch remember their position per monitor.
• Translations — every key the mod uses resolves in English, Spanish and Russian.

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Installation

for p in packages/*/; do ambxst mods install "$(realpath "$p")"; done
for id in $(ls packages); do ambxst mods enable "$id"; done
ambxst reload

The optional pre-rendered interpolation path uses ffmpeg and a Go toolchain to rebuild axvideo; prebuilt binaries ship in the mod, so neither is required for the default engine.

Note: every ambxst mods update builds a new generation and removes the previous one. Nothing to do by hand — the mod resolves its own paths to the live generation — but it is why a reload is needed to pick up a new build.

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Conventions

The rules this repo follows, kept here so contributions land in the same shape.

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• One package. Everything ships together, so a feature cannot be enabled on its own; gate it on its own config key instead.
• Prefer patches that only insert lines over replace overlays. Two mods inserting at the same anchor both survive; two mods rewriting the same base lines stop the build. SettingsTab.qml indexes panelComponents by section id, so a new section must claim the next free id and be appended — never renumber.
• Declare author, authorUrl, homepage and license. The install prompt is where a user decides whether to trust the code.
• Pin compatibility.ambxst to the range you tested and list testedBaseCommits.
• Do not ship expectedSha256 for a payload file identical to the base; it is a no-op overlay that fails the first time upstream touches it.

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Credits

This exists because of the people who built the pieces it ports and the shell it runs on.

• Axenide — creator of Ambxst. Everything here is a mod for that shell, and most of it ports features Ambxst had not implemented.
• Fabio (@fabiolopezperez-hue) — author of the Hax spotlight launcher, ported here essentially unchanged. The plugin system, the calculator, the quick actions and the whole spotlight are his work.
• outfoxxed — creator of Quickshell, the toolkit both Ambxst and NothingLess are written against.
• Odysseus (odysseus-dev, AGPL-3.0) — the agent "skills" concept (tool-discovery, verified-state-change, web-research-fallback and friends) and several desktop tool ideas in NothingClaw are adapted from it.

NothingLess reimplements a number of services Ambxst provides natively; those are deliberately not ported here, and their credit belongs to whoever wrote the Ambxst implementation.

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License

AGPL-3.0, matching both upstreams (Ambxst and NothingLess). See LICENSE.

Ambxst and the Ambxst logo are trademarks of Adriano Tisera (Axenide).