adm

Status: under active development, not well tested.

adm is a minimal display manager for Linux TTY with a Bubble Tea (Charm) user interface. It starts Wayland or X11 sessions from standard .desktop entries.

The code inspired and based on exellent Emptty display manager that also written in Go. Really I started the code with fork of Emptty with adding Bubble Tea TUI and changing some features.

Features

• Wayland and X11 carriers; configurable X server binary via XORG_BIN (e.g. Xlibre).
• Login and session selection in a TUI (username/password, optional :commands, session list).
• PAM authentication (service name adm).
• Configuration under /etc/adm/; user files ~/.config/adm or ~/.adm (see emptty-compatible semantics).

Build

make build   # binary: dist/adm

Build tags (same idea as emptty):

• nopam — build without PAM (testing / restricted libc).

make build TAGS=nopam

Install (outline)

make install install-config install-pam install-systemd

Enable adm.service and configure /etc/pam.d/adm. Migrate from emptty by replacing paths /etc/emptty → /etc/adm, emptty → adm, and user config ~/.config/emptty → ~/.config/adm.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 contributors.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 as published by the Free Software Foundation. See LICENSE.

Portions derived from emptty are used under the MIT License; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and LICENSES/MIT-emptty.txt.