Slab Status screensaver #

A macOS .saver that shows, fullscreen, the abstract status of our prompts plus this machine's system resources. Same visual language as the slab menubar icon, scaled up.

What it shows #

• Rotating polygon — one edge per live Claude session, colored by that session's state (green working / amber-pulse awaiting / slate complete / gray blank / dim-blink stale). 1 session = a bar, 2 = parallel bars, N≥3 = the matching N-gon. Idle = one slow-breathing ring. Rotation speeds up the more sessions are awaiting you.
• Status line + breakdown — 4 awaiting · 5 active, with non-zero per-state chips and ambient / muted mode tags.
• System resources — CPU % with per-core ticks, memory used/total, load average, uptime, clock.

It reads the same on-disk state the menubar reads (~/.local/share/slab/state/{active,awaiting}-prompts, mode flags) and is strictly read-only and subprocess-free — both required to behave inside Apple's sandboxed legacyScreenSaver host.

Build & install #

./build.sh            # compile + install to ~/Library/Screen Savers
./build.sh --build    # compile only (bundle lands in .build/)

No Xcode project — swiftc builds the loadable bundle directly (-emit-library -Xlinker -bundle), so Command Line Tools is enough. Ad-hoc signed, which is sufficient for a locally installed saver.

After install, pick it in System Settings → Screen Saver → Other → "Slab Status" (third-party savers live under the non-Apple group).

Notes / gotchas #

• Inside the screensaver sandbox, NSHomeDirectory() / $HOME point at the saver's container, not /Users/<you>. RealHome resolves the true home via getpwuid(getuid()) so the slab state path is correct.
• No Process/NSTask: lid/sleep/tailscale (which the menubar gets by shelling out) are intentionally omitted. CPU/mem/load come from Mach / sysctl / getloadavg, which are syscalls and work in the sandbox.
• legacyScreenSaver caches loaded bundles; build.sh kills it so the next engage / settings-pane open picks up a fresh build.