marchildmann/beveldesk

BevelDesk recreates the look and feel of a beveled 1990s style desktop, drawn entirely by hand using the Dear ImGui graphics library rather than reused system widgets or image assets. It comes as a single program with two visual moods you can switch between at runtime, a silver Windows 95 style scheme and a darker original scheme called NeXT Night, inspired by NeXTSTEP but not a copy of it. The desktop includes real window management such as dragging, resizing, minimizing to a taskbar, and maximizing with saved positions, plus a full system menu on each window. A file explorer browses your actual computer files, with sortable columns, folder icons, and classic scrollbars. There is also a working MS-DOS style prompt that runs a genuine interactive shell, your normal terminal shell such as zsh, inside an authentic looking terminal window, currently only on macOS and Linux. A taskbar and Start menu tie it together, including a clock, a Run box, a Display Properties screen for changing the color scheme, and the classic shutdown screen effect. Other details include zooming the whole interface in and out with the mouse wheel while keeping text sharp, and rendering that looks crisp on high resolution Retina style displays. Adding a brand new visual mood is designed to be simple, since every part of the interface reads its colors from one shared source. You can try a live version in a web browser with no installation, since the project also compiles to WebAssembly. To build it yourself you need CMake, a C++17 compiler, and an internet connection the first time you configure it, since dependencies like the GLFW windowing library and Dear ImGui are fetched automatically. Prebuilt binaries are also available for macOS, Linux, and Windows, though the Mac build is not signed and needs an extra step to open the first time. The project is released under the MIT license, and the code is organized into a visual styling layer, a desktop environment layer, and a platform specific layer for things like fonts and terminal handling.