aarchangel64 / melange

Render web pages using your system WebView to customise your desktop!

Melange

demo.mp4

Dashboards. Logout Screens. Weather Widgets. App Launchers. Anything your heart so desires. Easily create interactive, responsive, animated GUIs to customise your setup with the power of HTML, CSS, and Javascript!

Melange is program that renders a web page a using the embedded system WebView (WebkitGTK on Linux). It uses Wry under the hood.

Prerequisites

WebkitGTK is required for the WebView. Install it as so:

Arch Linux / Manjaro:

sudo pacman -S webkit2gtk

Debian / Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev

Fedora

sudo dnf install gtk3-devel webkit2gtk3-devel

Usage

Melange will load index.html from its config directory. Melange takes a single optional CLI argument, a config/data directory:

melange your/config/path/here

This allows you to make different HTML frontends for multiple different use cases. If this is not passed, Melange will default to looking in your user config directory ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/melange/, or ~/.config/melange/ on Linux).

Note that you can also pass in URLs like so:

melange http://127.0.0.1:8080

This can be useful if you wanted to develop your UI using a local dev server from tools such as Webpack or Vite. I highly discourage loading pages from the internet due to security risk, since Melange can run shell commands on your machine from JavaScript (even though the commands are only ones you manually specify in config.toml).