Media Island

A self-contained, top-center now-playing island for Noctalia. It shows album art, track metadata, playback progress, and transport controls without editing the user's Noctalia or compositor configuration.

The island briefly appears when playback starts or the current track changes. Open it manually from the bar widget to keep it visible until closed.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	notoxus/media-island
Entries	Bar widget: now-playing; panel: island; service: media-state

Requirements

Install busctl on PATH. It is provided by systemd on most Linux distributions. A media application exposing an MPRIS player is also required.

Usage

Enable Media Island in Settings → Plugins, then add the notoxus/media-island:now-playing widget to a bar.

• Left click opens or closes the island.
• Right click toggles Play/Pause.
• Scroll, Back, and Forward gestures change tracks.
• The panel's transport buttons provide Previous, Play/Pause, and Next.
• The close button dismisses a manually opened island.

The panel can also be toggled from a terminal:

noctalia msg panel-toggle notoxus/media-island:island

The panel defaults to a persistent floating surface at the top center. Its position and layer can be changed from the plugin's settings; choose the overlay layer if the island should appear above fullscreen windows.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
auto_show	bool	true	Briefly show the island when playback starts or the track changes.
preview_seconds	int	2	Automatic preview duration, from 1 to 10 seconds.

IPC

The service accepts panel and playback actions:

noctalia msg plugin notoxus/media-island:media-state all show
noctalia msg plugin notoxus/media-island:media-state all hide
noctalia msg plugin notoxus/media-island:media-state all toggle-panel
noctalia msg plugin notoxus/media-island:media-state all previous
noctalia msg plugin notoxus/media-island:media-state all toggle
noctalia msg plugin notoxus/media-island:media-state all next

Notes

The service polls Noctalia's MPRIS D-Bus facade with busctl every 500 ms so it follows the same active player as the built-in media widget. It invokes the Noctalia CLI to open and close the persistent panel idempotently.

Remote album artwork is downloaded through Noctalia's runtime API into the plugin's persistent data directory. The plugin does not modify user configuration files and does not require compositor autostart commands.