One language across the whole slab stack (the lid-ambient synth is already Swift).
No Python venv → no venv breakage, no numpy/sounddevice install fragility on a fresh Mac.
Faster cold start, lower memory, no GIL.
SF Symbols + native NSStatusItem give dynamic, template-aware icons that adapt to light/dark menu bars.
The passphrase-modal feature (deferred in Python) ships here.

The status-item icon changes by state:

State	Menu-bar picture
idle (no work)	slow-spinning rainbow line
N agent sessions	N-sided status polygon (one line / two bars / triangle…)
input waiting, no agent sessions	`message.fill` + un-ingested count
input waiting with agent sessions	message dot over the session polygon
ambient synth running	`waveform.path.ecg`
lid closed with unrepresented work	`moon.zzz.fill` or warning triangle

The root menu stays deliberately short and stable: Agents, Inbox, Work, Fleet & System, Media & Capture, Mac, and Slab. Each owns its details in a submenu; layout and terminal styling no longer crowd the Restore Threads menu. The footer contains a native About Slab window and Quit Slab.

Refresh cadence: 2 s. Mail unread count refreshes every 30 s (15 ticks).

Prompt rocks #

Sources/SlabMenubar/PromptSigilOverlay.swift — the tumbling stones parked at the top-right of each terminal window, one per live Claude session. When someone says "prompt rocks", this is it.

Shape = identity. Each rock is a 3D sigil grown from sessionId + prompt, so it re-forms when the session moves on to a new prompt. Frames are pre-rendered per rock (SigilRockFrames) and played back as a sprite sheet.
Motion = status. Spin speed and direction encode working / awaiting / complete / stale. A poke from a peer (the ledger's "observed" note) makes the stone blink and rattle.
Name + bubble. A deterministic pet name in Comic Sans bubble lettering sits under the stone; pointing at it reveals a card summarizing the prompt (one cheap claude -p haiku sentence, cached per seed).
A shared sun lights every rock from the local time of day, so the whole wall of stones re-lights together.

The rocks are borderless, click-through .floating windows — they ride above the normal-window stack so a busy wall of preview cards can't bury them. The price is that occlusion is hand-rolled, in two places that must agree: reposition hides a rock whose terminal corner is covered, and overlayAt refuses the pointer to a rock that is hidden or covered at the cursor. Skip either and a stone will wake up and pop its bubble through the window sitting on top of it.

Fleet prompt hosts #

Each Slab host publishes its Claude and Codex rocks on tailnet-only port 5252. The prox MCP can list, resolve, and poke those handles, or use prox_launch to open a new interactive Claude/Codex Terminal on a host. The launch endpoint is not a general remote shell: it accepts only those two installed launchers, a prompt of at most 4000 characters, and an existing cwd beneath the target user's home directory. Use slab/install.sh --prompt-host to install the agent hooks and wrappers without the legacy ambient-audio or lid-control services.

The app listens on a Unix domain socket at ~/.ac-daemon.sock (mode 0600). Any script on this user's account can request a passphrase.

Request / response #

→ {"op":"passphrase","label":"vault-ssh","timeout":600}
← {"ok":true,"secret":"…","cached":false}

timeout is the in-memory cache TTL in seconds (default 600).
Repeated requests for the same label return the cached secret with "cached":true until TTL expires.
Cancel: ← {"ok":false,"cancelled":true}.
Forget one: → {"op":"forget","label":"vault-ssh"}. Forget all: omit label.
Ping: → {"op":"ping"} → {"ok":true,"pong":true}.

Fish caller example #

set req '{"op":"passphrase","label":"vault","timeout":600}'
set resp (echo $req | nc -U ~/.ac-daemon.sock)
set phrase (echo $resp | jq -r '.secret // empty')

The modal is a native NSAlert + NSSecureTextField, brought to the front with NSApp.activate(ignoringOtherApps:).

Layout #

menubar-swift/
├── AppIcon.png                         # 1024px prompt-rock source artwork
├── AppIcon.icns                        # generated macOS bundle icon
├── Package.swift
├── install.sh                          # build + install + launchctl
├── computer.slab.menubar.plist.tmpl    # launchd agent template (@HOME@ is substituted)
└── Sources/SlabMenubar/
    ├── main.swift                      # NSApplication bootstrap
    ├── AppDelegate.swift               # status item, timer, menu actions
    ├── Paths.swift                     # all path + tool-location constants
    ├── ShellRunner.swift               # Process wrapper (sync + async)
    ├── StateSnapshot.swift             # polls lid/pmset/prompt dirs/ambient flag
    ├── TailnetPeer.swift               # `tailscale status --json` parser
    ├── IconRenderer.swift              # SF Symbol picker per state
    ├── MenuBuilder.swift               # NSMenu construction
    ├── PassphraseModal.swift           # NSAlert + NSSecureTextField
    └── PassphraseServer.swift          # Unix-socket JSON server with in-memory cache

Build & install #

./install.sh

Idempotent. Re-run after edits to rebuild, replace the binary, and bounce the launch agent. On Macs using the sandboxed Tailscale app, installation also provisions a user-local CLI wrapper so the fleet ledger can discover and bind its tailnet IP.

Manual #

swift build -c release
cp .build/release/slab-menubar-swift ~/.local/bin/slab-menubar
sed "s|@HOME@|$HOME|g" computer.slab.menubar.plist.tmpl > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/computer.slab.menubar.plist
launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/computer.slab.menubar.plist 2>/dev/null || true
launchctl load   ~/Library/LaunchAgents/computer.slab.menubar.plist

Logs: /tmp/slab-menubar.out, /tmp/slab-menubar.err.

Relation to slab/install.sh #

The Swift menubar replaces the Python menubar — slab/install.sh still sets up the daemon, hooks, sounds, and sudoers. Running menubar-swift/install.sh after that repoints the menubar plist at the compiled binary. Run order for a fresh Mac:

slab/install.sh                  # daemon + hooks + sounds + python menubar
slab/menubar-swift/install.sh    # overlay: replace python menubar with swift

Uninstall is handled by slab/uninstall.sh, which removes computer.slab.menubar.plist regardless of which binary it points to.

Future #

Hot reload via Inject: split into host exec + dylib so edits land in-process.
First-class callers: devault.fish, lith/deploy.fish, npm session scripts.
Richer status: lid sensor sparkline, ambient-synth peak, SSH session count.

slab-menubar (Swift) #

Why swift #

What's in the menu bar #