Reaction

Shows a sticker image or animated GIF with a sound on top of everything, as a heads-up overlay, and closes itself when it is done. It is the "cheer for me" button: one keypress, a Chitoge jumps on screen and a sound plays, then the screen is yours again.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	miixz/reaction
Entries	Panel: sticker; Bar widget: tile; Service: service

Requirements

• For the transparent overlay: python3 with GTK 3 bindings (python-gobject) and gtk-layer-shell. Without them the trigger falls back to the panel entry, which always paints the theme's card behind the sticker.
• ffmpeg for animated GIFs (magick from ImageMagick works as a fallback; static images need neither).
• A sticker file of your own. The plugin ships none.

Usage

The plugin never grabs a key on its own: Noctalia plugins cannot register global shortcuts, so the trigger key is a keybind in your compositor that runs the IPC command below. Pick whatever combination you like and set it there:

noctalia msg plugin miixz/reaction:service all trigger

Keybind examples

Hyprland (Lua config):

hl.bind(
    "SUPER + SHIFT + R",
    hl.dsp.exec_cmd("noctalia msg plugin miixz/reaction:service all trigger")
)

Niri (config.kdl):

binds {
    Mod+Shift+R { spawn "noctalia" "msg" "plugin" "miixz/reaction:service" "all" "trigger"; }
}

Sway / Scroll:

bindsym $mod+Shift+r exec noctalia msg plugin miixz/reaction:service all trigger

Any other compositor works the same way as long as it can run a command on a key.

Triggering again while the sticker is on screen restarts it instead of closing it. To dismiss it early:

noctalia msg plugin miixz/reaction:service all hide

The bar tile does the same thing: left click shows the sticker (and restarts it while it is on screen), right click dismisses it. Add it from Settings → Bar, it renders a mood-smile glyph that tints with the primary colour while the sticker is up.

The fallback panel can also be driven directly, which is the plain open/close toggle:

noctalia msg panel-toggle miixz/reaction:sticker

How long it stays

An animated GIF stays on screen for its own duration plus extra_ms. A static image stays for hold_ms. Either way the sticker fades out in the last 250 ms.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
sticker_path	file	(empty)	PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG or animated GIF to show.
sticker_dir	folder	(empty)	Folder with supported images. When set, the plugin picks one on each trigger instead of using sticker_path. sticker_path still works as a fallback.
sticker_selection	select	random	How the next sticker is chosen from sticker_dir: random or sequential.
sticker_position	select	center	Where the sticker lands: the nine screen positions plus auto. For the overlay, auto behaves like center.
sound_path	file	(empty)	Sound played when the sticker appears.
size_px	int	420	Sticker box in logical pixels; the image is scaled to fit inside it. In panel fallback, up to 420 fills the 448 px card.
opacity	double	1.0	Maximum sticker opacity, before the fade-out.
hold_ms	int	2500	How long a static sticker stays on screen.
extra_ms	int	250	Extra time on screen after an animated GIF has finished.

The trigger key is deliberately not a plugin setting: Noctalia does not expose global shortcuts to plugins, so it lives in your compositor's keybind config (see Usage). What the key runs is the IPC command below.

IPC

Command	Effect
noctalia msg plugin miixz/reaction:service all trigger	Show the sticker, or restart it when it is already on screen.
noctalia msg plugin miixz/reaction:service all hide	Dismiss it.
noctalia msg plugin miixz/reaction:service all status	Notification with the configured sticker and its state.

Notes

• The sticker is normally drawn by a companion process (bin/reaction-overlay.py): a transparent layer-shell surface on the overlay layer, above every window, with no background card at all. It ignores input completely (clicks pass through to the application below) and closes itself when its time is over. One instance runs at a time: a second trigger stops the running one and starts over from the first frame.
• The overlay reads ui_scale from the Noctalia accessibility settings, so a scaled desktop shows a proportionally sized sticker instead of a small one.
• Without the python stack, the trigger falls back to the sticker panel entry. Noctalia panels always paint the theme's rounded card behind their content, so the fallback sticker sits inside a themed card - the overlay exists to avoid exactly that. The panel declares keyboard_focus = "none" and dismiss_on_outside_click = false, so it never takes the keyboard away from the application in use and clicks pass through to it.
• Animated GIFs are unpacked into frames by the trigger service, once, into the plugin data directory (.../plugins/data/miixz/reaction/gif-cache). The cache is keyed by file, size and modification time. The overlay plays those extracted PNG frames directly, using the delays recorded in the cache's metadata.json; driving gdk-pixbuf's own animation instead makes the overlay's memory grow by roughly one frame per tick, so the static-frame path is what keeps it flat.
• The trigger service runs for the whole session so that the duration is ready before the first press; a first-time extraction of a large GIF would otherwise be visible as a late sticker.