Media Island

A self-contained, top-center now-playing island for Noctalia. You can also change its position to suit yourself. 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. The bar gets a thin, full-width audio wave along its lower edge; click the track title pill to show the island for the configured preview duration. The pill is hidden when playback has no artwork or title; the visualizer can still run on its own.

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.

• Click the track title to show the island briefly.
• Right click toggles Play/Pause.
• Scroll, Back, and Forward gestures change tracks.
• The panel's transport buttons provide Previous, Play/Pause, and Next.

The panel can also be toggled from a terminal:

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

The panel attaches below the bar widget. Automatic previews and title-click previews close after the configured duration; opening the panel directly from the command line leaves it open until toggled closed.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
auto_show	bool	false	Briefly show the island when playback starts or the track changes. Off by default, so it appears on click.
preview_seconds	int	2	Preview duration for automatic and title-click previews, from 1 to 10 seconds.
click_action	string	island	Clicking the track title opens the island preview (2 seconds by default).
audio_visualizer	bool	true	Show the full-width audio-reactive wave along the bar (requires Noctalia 5.4 / plugin API 36).

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.