Umbriel Monitor Control

Place and tune your monitors from the Noctalia bar: move a display left, right, above or below the others, and change its resolution, refresh rate and rotation. Every change is written into the Umbriel config file (validated before it lands, restored if invalid) and reloaded live, so settings persist across reboots. The same panel is one click away from the control center, through the plugin's display tile.

Umbriel only. This plugin drives the Umbriel compositor through its CLI and its config file; it does nothing under niri, Hyprland, Sway or any other compositor, and hides its widget outside an Umbriel session.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	muhammadessam/umbriel-monitor-control
Entries	Bar widget: monitor; shortcut: display; panel: panel; service: service

Requirements

• An Umbriel session (the umbriel CLI and its IPC socket must be present; the plugin hides its widget outside Umbriel).
• [output.*] sections are managed in the file at the config_path setting (default ~/.config/umbriel/config.toml).

Usage

Add the monitor widget to the bar: it shows the refresh rate of the output it sits on; click opens the panel. Or open the panel directly:

noctalia msg panel-toggle muhammadessam/umbriel-monitor-control:panel

The control center can carry a way into the same panel: add the display tile in Settings → Control Center → Shortcuts. It is the display glyph captioned with the focused output's resolution and opens the panel when clicked.

The panel opens with an arrangement map: every enabled output drawn as a rectangle where the compositor actually has it, scaled to keep its real proportions, with a legend row per monitor (name, mode, x, y in logical pixels). An output placed above another draws above it, side-by-side displays draw in one row. The focused output's rectangle carries the thicker border.

In the panel, each monitor card has a resolution dropdown, a refresh-rate dropdown and an Apply button, plus four placement buttons (left / right / up / down) and a rotation dropdown. The rotation dropdown lists Umbriel's eight transforms - 0°, 90°, 180°, 270°, and the same four flipped - and applies on the pick: which variant is right is only visible on screen, and the select always shows the transform the compositor is actually using.

A placement moves one axis only: the monitor lands just outside the others' edge on that side and level with them on the other axis, so left/right produce a row and up/down a column. With the other monitors at the origin that is the plain -x / +x / -y / +y move (y stays 0, x stays 0).

Below them, a Position row takes the two coordinates by hand — logical pixels, x then y, as the legend and the map show them (mode size / scale; negative y is above the origin). Enter in either box or the crosshair button applies them. The placement buttons stay the coarse move: press one and the fields update to whatever it landed on.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
config_path	string	~/.config/umbriel/config.toml	Umbriel config file the plugin patches.
auto_reload	bool	true	Reload the compositor after writing; off = persist-only.
show_text	bool	true	Bar widget shows the refresh rate next to the glyph.
glyph	glyph	device-desktop	Bar widget icon.

IPC

noctalia msg panel-toggle muhammadessam/umbriel-monitor-control:panel

Notes

• Files written: the configured Umbriel config (patched [output.*] sections only; comments and other keys are preserved) and a rolling backup config.toml.bak in the plugin's data dir, used to restore if a patched file fails umbriel config validate or for the revert request.
• Commands spawned: umbriel outputs --json (inventory), umbriel config validate -c <file> (pre-reload gate), umbriel msg config-reload (live apply). No network access.
• Resolution/refresh options come from the modes the display advertises, so the dropdowns only ever offer something the monitor can do. Umbriel falls back to the preferred mode if a saved mode cannot be applied later.
• Rotation is written as transform in the output's section, limited to Umbriel's vocabulary (normal, 90, 180, 270, flipped, flipped-90, flipped-180, flipped-270); anything else is refused before the file is touched. A 90°/270° transform (flipped or not) swaps the output's logical width and height, which is the space the arrangement map and the position fields work in.
• Placement uses logical layout coordinates (mode size divided by scale), matching Umbriel's own position semantics.
• Known limitation: [output.*] headers with the quoted monitor-name form are matched case-insensitively like Umbriel, but the plugin writes sections keyed by connector name (the umbriel outputs name field).