Desktop GUI

Build the layout you play in — drag windows anywhere, reskin them with real artwork, and change any setting from a right-click without leaving the game.

What it’s for

This is where you design your interface. Everything else — the terminal, the phone, the browser — plays the layout; the GUI is where you make it. You drag a window to the corner you want it in, right-click it to change its font, and watch the change land while combat text is still scrolling past.

It is also the only frontend with pixels. The compass is a drawn rose, the injury doll is a body diagram that colors by wound severity, and a skin can replace your window borders, backgrounds, and icons with real artwork. A character grid cannot do those things, so the GUI does them for everyone.

Set it up

Working with windows

Adding, hiding, deleting

Adding a window is the Windows catalog, not a right-click. Click Windows in the toolbar and you get every window the client can have — the built-in catalog plus game dialogs, streams, and containers — sorted by title and grouped into collapsed categories. Each row is a checkbox (tick to show, untick to hide) and a zone dropdown. Setting the zone on a hidden window decides where it appears when you show it.

Two buttons sit at the top of the catalog:

• ➕ Custom window… creates a blank widget of the type you pick and drops you into the new window’s right-click menu to configure it.
• ↩ Restore deleted… brings back a window you deleted, with its position, streams, and widget type intact. It appears only when something is waiting to be restored.

⚠️ .deletewindow truly deletes and .hidewindow hides — in both desktop frontends. There is no asymmetry to remember. Delete stashes the window so ↩ Restore deleted… can bring it back, and both commands refuse to remove your only main-feed window.

⚠️ There is no button to save a layout. .savelayout <name> is typed, in the GUI as much as the terminal. The catalog says so itself when no layouts exist yet.

Moving, resizing, snapping

Drag a window from anywhere — body or title bar, no modifier held. Interactive content still wins, so selecting text or clicking a link does not start a drag. Resize by dragging any edge or corner.

⚠️ The GUI drags from the whole window; the TUI drags from the title bar only. And Ctrl+drag is not window movement in either frontend — it is the object-drag gesture that sends _drag, for dropping an item onto a hand, a container, or another item.

While you drag or resize, edges snap to the zone’s bounds, to other windows in the same zone, and optionally to a grid. An engaged snap draws a guide line at the matched coordinate. Hold Shift to suspend snapping and place the window exactly where the pointer is — the guides disappear for as long as you hold it.

A snapped drop can promote to a persistent anchor, which makes the window keep following the edge it snapped to when the app window resizes. Right-click ▸ Arrange ▸ Release Anchors forgets them; the window stays exactly where it is and stops following. Dragging the window away from its snap does the same thing. The row is always visible, greyed when the window has no anchors, so you can tell at a glance which case you are in.

Tune the whole system under Settings ▸ GUI: snap distance, which targets participate, grid pitch, and grid sizing. .snapdebug writes a trace of the snap engine to ~/.vellum-fe/vellum-fe.log when a snap is not doing what you expect.

Zones

The GUI arranges windows in five zones — Header, Footer, Left Bar, Center, and Right Bar. Toggle them from the toolbar’s Zones hub, which stays open so you can adjust several and watch each take effect, or type .header, .footer, .leftbar, .rightbar (each takes on, off, or toggle, defaulting to toggle).

Every zone is a free canvas: windows sit exactly where you drop them, may overlap, and remember their spot. Moving a window to a different zone has three routes:

• Alt+drag the window. Hold Alt and drag, and a tinted overlay highlights the zone under your pointer; release to drop it there. Ordinary movement is suppressed while Alt is held, so the two gestures never fight.
• Right-click ▸ Arrange ▸ Move to ▸ the zone you want.
• The zone dropdown on that window’s row in the Windows catalog — the one that also works on a window that is currently hidden.

Overlapping and detaching

Where windows can overlap — Center, Header, and Footer — the right-click menu offers Send to Back, dropping the window behind anything it covers so a buried one becomes reachable. Clicking a window still raises it. The packed sidebars do not offer it, because nothing overlaps there.

Detach puts a window in its own OS window, restored across sessions. A detached window gets the same right-click menu with Reattach in place of Detach, and without Arrange, Group, or Send to Back — none of them mean anything inside an OS window. Drag its body to move it.

The right-click menu

Right-click any window body and you get every per-window setting there is. Changes apply live — there is no Save button. Text fields commit when you press Enter or click away. .editwindow <name> opens the same menu for a window by name.

⚠️ The GUI’s separate Window Editor no longer exists. If a guide tells you to open an editor window and press Save, it is describing the old client. Right-click is the one home for these settings now. (The TUI still has its own full-screen editor form.)

Three quick actions sit at the top — Hide, Detach (or Reattach), and Send to Back — then collapsible sections, each with its own Advanced fold so the menu opens short.

Window

Title, Title bar text (custom text for the bar, separate from the window’s name), Streams — the stream ids this window collects, with a + picker listing every stream seen this session so you do not have to know an id in advance — Buffer lines (scrollback size), Speak new lines (TTS), and Lock in place. A locked window can still be grabbed but will not move or resize; .lockwindows locks everything at once.

Under Advanced: Compact (condenses known content such as bounty text), Timestamps with a Timestamp at line start toggle, and Delete Window…. Delete is double-gated — the first click arms it, then the menu asks “Really delete this window from the layout?” with Delete and Cancel.

The widget section

Named for the widget itself, and present only when the widget has settings of its own:

• Timer / Bar — the feed id it tracks, its label, color, whether it shows value/max or a bare value, and Stay visible at rest for timers that should not vanish at zero.
• Effects — which category the window carries.
• Room — section toggles for Description, Objects, Players, and Exits.
• Targets — the filtered-appendage count and status position, plus Global target settings…, which jumps to Settings ▸ Targets where the colors and excluded nouns live for every targets window at once.
• Experience — Level, Mind state, Experience bar, Total exp, Ascension exp, and the two bar colors. Encumbrance — Level bar and Help text.
• Vitals — Layout (orientation), Bar height, Bar text format, Depleted color, and a checkbox per bar in display order.

Widgets with an editor of their own link to it from here: Edit tabs… (tab names, streams, and order), Edit hotbars…, Edit indicators…, Edit dashboard…, Hand icons… (status-driven icons for an empty hand, a held weapon, a prepared spell), Calibrate doll…, and Open Map Explorer.

Arrange, Appearance, Group

Arrange holds Move Window (a keyboard-friendly move that works even on a locked window), Move to ▸ each zone, and Release Anchors. Under Advanced: Fixed size, which keeps a window’s exact width and height when the app window resizes or zooms so only its position adapts — what you want for a compass or a hands widget.

Appearance splits into Text (font, text size, word wrap, content alignment), Title bar (show it, and its alignment), and Frame (border on/off and style, accent color, skin frame, background). Under Advanced sit the knobs you set once: title-bar height, which border sides draw, corner radius, and frame scale.

Group locks windows together so they move as a unit. It sets the group’s orientation (Stacked or Side by side), reorders members with ⬆ / ⬇, and ungroups one member or the whole group.

The toolbar hubs

Four stay-open menus sit across the top. None of them close when you click inside — only clicking outside dismisses them — so you can make several changes and watch each land.

The distinction between the last two is worth knowing: Settings holds the knobs that live in config.toml, while Editors holds the authored content that owns its own files — your highlight rules, your keybinds, your hotbars.

Graphics and skins

The GUI draws what the terminal spells:

• Compass rose — a vector rose with lit direction markers.
• Injury doll — a body diagram colored by wound and scar severity. With a skin that ships doll art, wounds render as dots at positions you set by clicking, through Calibrate doll… in the doll window’s own menu section.
• Status icons — vector pictograms for stance, hidden, stunned, and the rest of the indicator set.

A skin replaces all of it at once — nine-slice window borders, background art, icon sprites, a sprite compass and paperdoll. .skins lists what is installed, .setskin <name> activates one, .setskin none turns skinning off, and .makeskin <name> scaffolds a starter skin you can edit. Per-window, Appearance ▸ Frame picks which frame from the active skin a given window wears. See Skins (GUI Graphics).

Common setups

A hunting layout you can rebuild in five minutes

1. Click Zones and turn on Header and Right Bar.
2. Click Windows, tick Vitals and set its zone dropdown to Header; tick Roundtime, Compass, and Targets and set them to Right Bar.
3. Drag each one where you want it. Hold Shift while dropping the compass if the snap keeps pulling it flush against an edge you want it off of.
4. Right-click the compass ▸ Arrange ▸ Advanced ▸ tick Fixed size, so it keeps its proportions when you resize the app window.
5. Type .savelayout hunting.

You’ll see: the arrangement redraw exactly as you left it after .loadlayout hunting — including on the terminal, which reads the same layout pool.

A story window that reads the way you read

Right-click your main story window. Under Window, raise Buffer lines so a long hunt stays scrollable. Under Advanced, tick Timestamps and Timestamp at line start if you want to reconstruct a fight afterward. Under Appearance ▸ Text, pick a font and size that suit your monitor, and turn word wrap on. Under Appearance ▸ Frame, set an accent color so the window you look at most is instantly identifiable.

You’ll see: each change take effect while game text is still arriving — timestamps appear on the next line, the font reflows what is already on screen, and nothing needs saving.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ In the Desktop GUI, Ctrl+C quits. In the Terminal (TUI) the same combination copies your selection and does not quit at all. This is the single biggest trap when you move between the two. To copy in the GUI, select with the mouse (double-click for a word, triple-click for a line) and then press Ctrl+C.

⚠️ .quit disconnects but keeps the window open by default. Run it again, or use .exit, to close. Change it with ui.keep_open_on_quit in Settings.

• There is no right-click “Add Window”. Adding is the Windows catalog or .addwindow. Right-click configures a window that already exists.
• Copy is plain text, deliberately. Selections are anchored to the text itself, so they survive scrolling — drag past the window edge to auto-scroll and the copy picks up lines currently out of view — but colors and styling are not carried to the clipboard.
• Hiding is the control for game dialogs. A hidden window stays hidden even when the game re-sends it. There is no separate blocklist to maintain.
• Even the story window can be hidden, once another window or tab carries the main stream. Hiding the command input hands typing to the built-in bottom bar.
• Terminal-only commands do nothing here. .setpalette, .resetpalette, .transparent, and .resize belong to the TUI; themes and skins handle appearance in the GUI.
• Layouts are shared; the live arrangement is not. .savelayout / .loadlayout write to the pool both desktop frontends read, but the GUI keeps its own per-character live layout (positions, zoom, fonts) apart from the TUI’s layout.toml.
• Ctrl+F opens in-window search with match highlighting. Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 zoom the whole interface.
• The two “Launchers” are unrelated. The Launcher is the graphical connection list. The SSH Launcher (.launcher / .launch <character>) is an in-session panel that cold-starts a headless Lich on another machine.

See also

• Frontends overview — all five, and how to choose
• Terminal (TUI) — the terminal counterpart, and its own window editor
• Mobile Web — joining a GUI session from a phone or browser
• The Launcher — saved connections and per-connection frontend
• First Launch — command-line flags and the default screen
• Skins (GUI Graphics) · Widgets · Map
• Configuration Files — the settings all frontends share