The Cyanotype Project

Blueprint is a clean-room revival of the SGI Indigo Magic Desktop, the IRIX Interactive Desktop. Portable C99, X11, and a BSD 2-clause license. The 1.0 release is aimed at 31 October 2026.

What it is

It's a remake of SGI's desktop environment with a "what if" stance. It aims to reproduce the best parts such as the look and feel of 4DWM, the "clogin" login manager, the "fm" file manager in IRIX, Icon Catalog, most of the preferences apps, and other SGM (SGI's widget toolkit) apps that were notable. Some parts of the environment are pixel perfect clean-room re-implementations. CyWM is, by most, indistinguishable from 4DWM. However, it does a lot more such as easy-tiling features and modern EWMH and ICCCM. So, the idea here is "IRIX && IMD plus all the good stuff that's happened since then."

The pixel standard is real SGI hardware running IMD. Bevels are measured off SGI hardware and drawn to that law, not approximated until the screenshot looks close enough. However, some things had to be altered. For example, in IRIX the 'fm' file manager has an "Internet" pull down menu with half-baked features like "Icon View of a Web site" (broken) and "Icon View of an FTP Site" (mostly broken). Those were exciting when IMD was new, they are strange broken artifacts today. So, that's not something we reproduce. However, looking at the face CyFiler you could be forgiven for thinking it's actually IRIX's 'fm'.

It is built to run on old hardware and on small memory, and on more than one instruction set. SGI MIPS systems running IRIX are the point, not a souvenir port. NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and a spread of Linux are where it gets built and used day to day. Solaris, AIX, Tru64, and HP-UX stay in scope for the same reason IRIX does: those are the machines the language and the library choices are held to. Now it's time for the work stopped in 2006 to start over with fresh leadership, no apologies, and new resources. Specifically, artificial intelligence to do some of the heavy lifting.

This is not for fans of the latest trendy bad-decisions made by the leading Linux distros. This is for people who miss the simplicity and raw power of IRIX as well as its fun attitude and explorer's mindset. It's a labor of love for SGI lovers and modern desktop users BOTH. It's run by a mix of the young and the old and thus we also have a very sharp eye on accessibility.

Project creed

1. Meet the operating system where it is. Do not write a second NetworkManager (the first one is horrible enough, and I hate it), a second audio sink manager (PulseAudio did quite enough damage, thank you), or a second way of doing a job the host already does via OS tools and facilities. We won't write something like gvfs, or another meta-multimedia framework like GNOME did. That's an anti-pattern. We'll call tools that are already great at what they do, for tasks they already handle.
2. Stay in C99. Do not drag the language toward C++. Do not go past what MIPSpro can optimize. The payoff for C21 or whatever is super-small, and the cost lands on the machines this desktop is built for. No deal.
3. Run on old hardware and on low memory, on many CPUs, and especially on SGI MIPS. A new release does not get to demand a new computer. Running on old hardware keeps us optimized. Bulk is a defect. Optimization is a feature.
4. This is an X11 project. Wayland is out of scope. The longer version is in the FAQ, and it is not diplomatic or apologetic.
5. No political or religious statements are permitted (CoCs or the like). Technology decisions only. Merit wins. Well written patches, bug reports, and requests are welcome.

Four engineering rules already in the tree, beside that creed:

• Honor and obey the Unix Philosophy. That's our guiding light, our raison d'etre. Honor and acknowledge the incredible work nearly every modern IT edifice is built on (the good ones, anyway).
• Follow SGI's visual design guidelines, which, fortunately, they left in abundance.
• Use AI to accelerate the project into something usable within our lifetimes. No apologies. Without AI this project would not exist, because most purists would rather sit on their hands than build.
• Keep the C code readable, well-structured, and human-accessible, as some of it was, and is, human-created. This project started in 2007. It just wasn't something one could accomplish realistically until now.

Indigo Magic, and SGI

Cyanotype is written from scratch. It is not a fork of IRIX, not a copy of the Indigo Magic sources, and not a skin. SGI, IRIX, Indigo Magic, and the other marks belong to their owners. The project is not affiliated with Silicon Graphics, not endorsed by them, and not speaking for them.

The fidelity we are after is config-level and pixel-level. The same jobs, the same manners, the same measured look, on real SGI hardware and on any other machine that speaks X11. Canonical behavior stays faithful to that desktop. New work lands in an extended layer (the preferences, the extra features) and does not rewrite the canonical picture to pretend the original was something else.

There is a speculation in the project, and it should be labeled as one. Blueprint is a guess at what IRIX 7 might have been if SGI had survived and kept building this desktop. That is a guess about a future that did not happen. It is not a claim that SGI planned these programs, and it is not their product. The work is "what they might have done," done by someone else, in the open, because the originals are not coming back.

A separate collection of surviving SGI manuals and community archives lives elsewhere on this machine. That mirror is preservation. This page is the desktop.

The desk, in use

These pictures were taken on oreo on 31 October 2026, at 3840x2160. The first three are applications on the desk. The last two are preference panels.

Where to go from here

• The applications, including the preference panels.
• libcyui, the widget set, and the plan to leave Motif behind.
• FAQ. Who it is for, the platforms, C99, X11, and what this project will not do.
• Benchmarks. wmbench on slab, 30 October 2026.
• Downloads. Release files.
• Feedback. Bugs, requests, and notes. There is also cyanotype@irix.expert.

The source of the desktop is the blueprint tree.