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scoot — a grumpy ginger cat about to swat a window sidewaysscoot
scoot — a grumpy ginger cat swats terminal windows sideways off a black background, under a huge white scoot wordmark

knocks your windows sideways.

A scrolling Wayland compositor. Windows tile in sideways-scrolling columns, it runs without a GPU, and agents can drive it over IPC.
Try it in DockerInstall

Try it now

Section titled “Try it now”

One command. No install, no GPU.

Terminal window
docker run --rm -p 127.0.0.1:6080:6080 ghcr.io/scoot-sh/try-scoot

Open http://127.0.0.1:6080. Click the desktop. Press Alt+Return for a second terminal. No Docker? Use Nix. To keep it: Install, including the scoot desktop.

Looks

Section titled “Looks”

Five looks ship with the desktop — picking one themes the compositor, the bar and the wallpaper together (the default is ginger-night):

The ginger-night look: a floating translucent bar over two translucent terminal columns, the cat-peeking illustration behindginger-night (default) The vinyl-sunset look: a floating translucent bar over two translucent terminal columns, a sunset illustration behindvinyl-sunset The moonrise look: a calm amber-on-navy desktopmoonrise The music-desk look: a blue-on-paper desktopmusic-desk The radial-burst look: a blue-on-plum desktopradial-burst

The default look running the full desktop — bar, launcher and notifications over two terminals:

The full scoot desktop in the ginger-night look: the bar with an unread count, two terminals, the launcher mid-search and two notification cards

Three ways in

Section titled “Three ways in”

Pick one:

  • The scoot desktop — the easy mode, on NixOS with a flake and home-manager. One switch plus a look gets the full lightweight desktop: compositor, bar, wallpaper, idle and lock, notifications, launcher, screenshots, hardware keys, all themed together. Start here if you run NixOS.
  • Any Linux — one command installs the compositor, the bar and the wallpaper on any glibc distro, puts scoot on your login screen, and can write a look. Build your desktop adds the lock, launcher and notifications from your distro.
  • Agents, headless and webtop — drive scoot from code. The IPC socket, screenshots, --help --json, llms.txt sets for every section, and the webtop recipe for containers.

Start here, in order

Section titled “Start here, in order”
  1. Install — try it in your browser, then keep it on any Linux or NixOS.
  2. First run — run scoot, open a terminal, learn three keys.
  3. Build your desktop — bar, wallpaper, launcher and notifications.
  4. Keybindings — the full default map and how to make it yours.

Why scoot

Section titled “Why scoot”
  • Scrolling columns, not a grid. Focus follows position; nothing ever hides.
  • No GPU required. The CPU renderer draws without a GPU, so scoot runs on a webtop container, a VM, and real hardware alike — and the same build scans out from the GPU where there is one (picking takes one look).
  • Scriptable to the core. Every action in Keybindings is also an IPC action an agent can send — windows, screenshots, input, the lot.

Home-page art: the project logo (docs/assets/logo.png). Look previews: vinyl-sunset, moonrise, music-desk and radial-burst.