website/docs/apps.md

Apps

An app is a component that renders inside a window. It receives its window's parameters, can rename its window and can rewrite its own parameters — and knows nothing else about the OS.

The registry

src/os/registry.ts is the single source of truth. Adding an entry there is all it takes for an app to appear on the desktop, in the Go menu, in the command palette and in the About app. There is no router change, no menu update, no icon grid to edit.

interface AppDefinition {
  id: string;              // 'feed' — also the ?app= value and the window id prefix
  title: string;           // default window title
  description: string;     // one line, shown in the palette and About
  icon: LucideIcon;
  category: 'social' | 'tools' | 'system';
  component: LazyExoticComponent<ComponentType<AppProps>>;
  defaultSize: Size;       // capped to the viewport by fitSize()
  minSize: Size;           // enforced while resizing
  resizable?: boolean;     // default true
  singleton?: boolean;     // default true — a second open focuses the existing window
  showOnDesktop?: boolean; // default true
  requiresAuth?: boolean;
}

Every component is a React.lazy(() => import('@/apps/<id>')), so each app is its own code-split chunk and the initial bundle contains only the shell. WindowFrame supplies the <Suspense> skeleton and an ErrorBoundary around it — a crashing app takes down its own window, not the desktop.

The contract

interface AppProps {
  windowId: string;
  params: AppParams;                  // Record<string, string>
  setTitle: (title: string) => void;  // truncated to 48 chars by the reducer
  setParams: (params: AppParams) => void;
}

params is the app's navigation state, not local state. Putting the current selection in params rather than useState buys three things at once: the URL describes what is on screen, a reload restores it, and the state survives the remount when the window switches between the desktop and mobile shells. The Reader does this with the selected article; the Feed keeps its scope in local state because a tab choice is not worth a URL.

setTitle is normally called from an effect once the content is known:

useEffect(() => {
  setTitle(name ? `Profile — ${name}` : 'Profile');
}, [name, setTitle]);

Adding an app

1. Create src/apps/<id>/index.tsx with a default export taking AppProps.
2. Build the UI from the AppChrome primitives (see styleguide.md) so it fills its window instead of centring a column like a web page.
3. Add an entry to APPS in src/os/registry.ts.
4. If the app should be reachable by a NIP-19 identifier, map that identifier to it in src/pages/NIP19Page.tsx.
5. Run npm run test.

A minimal app:

import { useEffect } from 'react';
import { AppBody, AppLayout, AppToolbar } from '@/components/os/AppChrome';
import type { AppProps } from '@/os/types';

export default function ExampleApp({ setTitle }: AppProps) {
  useEffect(() => setTitle('Example'), [setTitle]);

  return (
    <AppLayout>
      <AppToolbar>
        <span className="text-[13px] font-medium">Example</span>
      </AppToolbar>
      <AppBody className="p-4">…</AppBody>
    </AppLayout>
  );
}

The eleven apps

App	id	Params	Notes
Feed	feed	—	kind 1 timeline, Following/Global, composer (⌘↵ publishes)
Profile	profile	pubkey, relays?	kind 0 metadata, the author's notes, follow/unfollow
Note	notes	id?, relays?	One note and its replies, or a blank local draft when id is absent. Not a singleton
Reader	articles	pubkey?, identifier?, kind?, relays?	NIP-23 long-form, react-markdown, NIP-84 highlights
Bookmarks	bookmarks	—	NIP-51 kind 10003 list — bookmarked notes and articles
Web Bookmarks	web-bookmarks	—	NIP-B0 kind 39701 — one addressable event per saved URL
Live	live	pubkey?, identifier?	NIP-53 kind 30311 live events + kind 1311 chat
Spells	spells	id?	Saved/shareable REQ filters — kind 777, a third-party draft NIP
Relays	relays	—	Connection state, subscription count, measured latency
Settings	settings	—	Theme, relay list, Blossom servers, account, session
About	about	—	What this is, the app list, the shortcuts

Spells are a third-party kind, adopted for interop

Kind 777 ("Spell") isn't in the official nostr-protocol/nips registry — it comes from Grimoire, a third-party Nostr client that also happens to be a tiling-window-manager OS like this one. src/hooks/useSpells.ts implements its draft NIP as-is (same tag names, same $me/$contacts runtime variables, same relative timestamp grammar) rather than inventing an incompatible shape, so a spell saved here is readable by Grimoire and vice versa. Only the "Spell" half (kind 777, a saved query) is implemented; "Spellbook" (kind 30777, a saved window layout) is not — see the app's tracking issue for that as a possible follow-up.

Live only links out to playback, it doesn't embed a player

NIP-53's streaming tag is typically an HLS (.m3u8) URL, which no browser plays natively without a library like hls.js. Rather than pull that dependency in for a first cut, the Live app (src/apps/live) shows the stream's metadata and chat and opens streaming (or recording, once status is ended) in a new tab. Spaces/interactive rooms (kind 30312/30313) are a separate, larger effort — see the tracking issue.

Web bookmarks are one event per URL, not a list

Unlike a NIP-51 list, each NIP-B0 web bookmark (kind 39701) is its own addressable event — the d tag is the URL itself (scheme stripped for https, see bookmarkDTag in src/hooks/useWebBookmarks.ts). Removing one publishes a NIP-09 kind 5 deletion request, which relays are free to ignore, so the client also drops it from its own query cache rather than trusting a refetch to reflect it.

Highlighting selects against the DOM, not the markdown source

HighlightLayer (src/apps/articles/HighlightLayer.tsx) tracks window.getSelection() against the rendered article, not the raw markdown — the highlighted text saved to a kind 9802 event is whatever that Selection's .toString() returns, i.e. the plain-text content the reader actually saw, not markdown syntax.

Bookmarks are one whole-list replacement, like follow lists

kind 10003 is a replaceable event: publishing it replaces the entire list. useToggleBookmark (src/hooks/useBookmarks.ts) therefore reads the current list back before publishing an update, the same trap follow lists have.

Follow lists are a whole-list replacement

kind 3 replaces the entire contact list. The follow button therefore reads the current list back before writing, or the edit would silently drop everyone else.

Relay latency is a real round trip

A WebSocket gives the browser no ping, so the Relays app times an actual REQ/EOSE cycle ({ kinds: [1], limit: 1 }, 5s timeout). It is the only honest number available.

useRelayStatus samples socket state once a second — sockets have no change event to subscribe to — and feeds both the Relays app and the menu bar indicator, so the two can never disagree.

A closed socket is the resting state, not a fault: relays are opened on demand and dropped after idling. That is why nothing turns red at "0 connected"; only a connection that keeps trying to establish itself gets an amber dot.