Notch, taskbar and launcher

The chrome, top to bottom

Three surfaces are always available, and all three run on the same action grammar, so anything one of them can launch, the others can too.

The Notch

The Notch is a rounded pill of chips centred at the top of the screen — the macOS-style shelf of things you actually open every day. Click a chip to run it.

With no configuration it shows six defaults: Apps, Shell, Files, Web, Chat and Control. Editing it in Control Center → Notch, or writing ~/.config/tde/notch.toml by hand, replaces that list.

[settings]
enabled = true
icons_only = false

[[items]]
icon = "🚀"
label = "Apps"
action = "launcher"

[[items]]
icon = "🗄"
label = "Backups"
action = "cmd:restic snapshots"

enabled = false stops it being drawn or hit-tested at all. icons_only = true drops the labels even when they would fit. An item with an empty action is discarded, and if that empties the whole list the built-in defaults come back — a broken file can never leave you with no Notch.

Chips are wide (icon label) when the cluster fits the screen and collapse to icon-only when it does not; if an item has no icon, the first letter of its label stands in.

The action grammar

An action is a short string the desktop interprets. The same grammar is used by the Notch, the command palette and commands/*.toml files.

The built-in ids are:

launcher   terminal  shell     files     editor    browser
sheets     docs      api       redis     vercel    webhook
database   mermaid   aichat    email     hosts     process
container  env       control   myloop    store     git
pr         wiper

An action the desktop does not recognise pops a toast saying so, rather than failing silently.

The Launcher

Alt+Space (or the Super key) opens the Launcher: one search field over everything the desktop can start. It is not an app grid — it is closer to VS Code's command palette, because every native app registers its individual commands, not just "Open".

Typing searches, in one ranked list:

• System commands — Shell, Browser, Files, Code, Git, Database, Redis, Mermaid, Hosts, AI Chat, Email, Control, Resume, Store, Clipboard, System Monitor, Wiper, Packages, Updates, Join Web Share, Lock, Suspend, Logout, Restart, Shutdown. A shorter default subset shows on an empty query; all of them are searchable.
• Open windows, so the Launcher doubles as a window switcher.
• Per-app commands — Control: Appearance, My Loop: Usage & Costs, TDE-Email: Configure accounts, and so on.
• Installed apps from the Store catalog, plus agent CLIs TDE detected on your PATH.
• Not-yet-installed Store apps, as full results while searching and as a four-item teaser on an empty query.
• Recent files, read from the desktop-standard ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel.

Matching is fuzzy with a bias toward exact substrings: a contiguous match scores highest, a subsequence match (ctlap → Control: Appearance) still matches but scores lower, and each category adds a fixed weight so a system command outranks a Store teaser at the same text score. Rows are labelled App: Title and matched against "App Title", so either half finds them.

Paste or type something that looks like a URL and an Open in browser row jumps to the top.

Adding your own rows takes one TOML file and no code — see Extending without code.

The Start menu

F1 (or Alt+A, or the ≡ Start button on the status bar) opens the Start menu: the TDE wordmark and build version, a search row, a category sidebar and a scrollable list of installed apps. Tab cycles focus between search, sidebar and list.

It shares its implementation with the Store overlay (F2 / Alt+S), which is the same shell pointed at the catalog of apps you have not installed yet.

Taskbar and status bar

The bottom two rows are fixed chrome.

The taskbar row carries one slot per open window on the current workspace, plus the workspace pager on the right: a numbered token per workspace and a trailing + that adds one.

The status bar row carries, from the left, five launch pills — ≡ Start, ▤ Files, ⬇ Store, ⚙ Control, ◆ My Loop — and a ⎘ Clip button for clipboard history. The right side is system state.

System indicators

Indicators are drawn right-aligned in a fixed order and simply omitted when the machine has nothing to report. Only the clock is guaranteed.

Wi-Fi shows signal bars and a truncated SSID, Ethernet shows 🖧 LAN, and no connection shows ✕ net.

Two more pills appear conditionally: the Agent Dock pill with its activity strip (also Alt+G), and an update badge ⬆ N in the warning colour when the updater has found pending updates — clicking it opens the updater.

Alt+T moves keyboard focus into the taskbar and Alt+P into the status bar, so the whole bottom strip is reachable without a mouse.

Notifications

Toasts stack in the top-right corner, four at a time, with a counter for any older ones. They come from two places: TDE's own actions (a copy confirmed, a screenshot saved, a process killed, an unknown action attempted) and the standard org.freedesktop.Notifications D-Bus service, so any Linux app running inside the desktop can raise one. A default notification lives four seconds; an app asking to stay "until dismissed" is clamped to an hour, and explicit timeouts are clamped to between 1 and 30 seconds. Esc dismisses what is on screen; the last 50 stay in history.

Related

• Extending without code — add Notch items and palette commands with TOML.
• Configuration — the notch.toml and commands/*.toml schemas.
• Control Center — the Notch, Keyboard and Widgets panels.
• Store overview — where the installable apps come from.