Dashboard and Home
A new owner starts with clock, weather, host, servers, storage, and a scratchpad note. Home greets the display name from owner setup. Type a city on the weather widget without entering layout mode, write in the note, then use Edit layout for shortcuts and arrangement. Nothing is pre-filled with a fake city or demo server.
Overview, Home, Storage, Network, Host, Security, Terminal, Servers, Hooks, Strands, and Globe are full pages. Globe starts hidden; add it from Arrange or Settings. An empty URL fragment opens Home so a pinned tab lands on the dashboard. Settings stays at the bottom of the sidebar. Choose Arrange beside Pages to move, hide, or add primary pages; the set and order follow the owner account. Hidden pages keep their slot, so Add puts them back where they were.
Host metrics refresh every five seconds by default. Change that interval in Settings → Dashboard behavior. The top-right refresh button requests a fresh snapshot immediately and stays static between requests. A saved one-second interval stays one second.
Home supports several independent layouts. Open Templates to:
- switch the active Home;
- create a blank layout;
- duplicate or rename the current layout;
- export one layout as bounded JSON;
- import a shared Helix Home JSON file; or
- remove a layout after confirmation.
At least one Home always remains. Imported data is validated before it replaces anything. Export is the easiest portable copy, while the authoritative layouts are also stored in Helix's revisioned state database and included in state backups.
Choose Edit layout to add widgets, drag them by their handle, or move them with keyboard-accessible controls. Every widget can choose width, height, title, and accent color. Click a tile to select it, then Copy (or Ctrl+C / Cmd+C) and Paste (or Ctrl+V / Cmd+V) to duplicate it on this Home or another one. Widget settings also has Copy to another Home. The grid reflows at desktop, tablet, and mobile widths, so a layout with one widget and a layout at the configured maximum both stay usable.
Available widgets are Clock, Host pulse, Live graphs, Servers, Storage, Docker,
Weather, Notes, Shortcut, Strand, and Globe. Shortcuts accept only validated HTTP(S)
URLs and open in a new tab. Strand widgets embed an enabled package that
declared helix:ui.widget. The Globe widget is the same country-level map as
the Globe page, including an optional data-motion toggle in widget settings. While editing, Import from Homarr reads Homarr
apps that already have an http(s) address. Current Homarr stores those in SQLite; older
Homarr JSON configs still work. Helix adds the checked shortcuts onto the Home
you are already editing, in Homarr's layout order as short tiles. They do not
create a separate Homarr Home. Those tiles are normal widgets: rename them,
resize them, recolor them, or copy them onto any other Home. Re-import skips
shortcuts that are already on that Home. On a plain HTTP dashboard, Paste uses Helix's
saved copy when the browser blocks the system clipboard. Long names stay inside
the picker rows and tiles. Icons come
from Homarr's http(s) icon URLs, Homarr icon names via the dashboard-icons set, or
Helix's matcher on the app name and link. Uploaded Homarr media files, notes, and
Homarr-only apps stay in Homarr.
Copy all copies every widget on the current Home. Paste onto another Home drops that whole set onto the destination in one go, then you can rearrange. Ctrl/Cmd+A selects all tiles while editing; Ctrl/Cmd+C copies the selection, or all tiles if nothing is selected. Widget settings still has Copy to another Home for a single tile. Full screen hides the sidebar and the top bar (Helix, refresh, theme, account). Exit full screen from the Home page button to bring them back.
Overview can show the same live graphs behind a toggle. Those samples live in the browser; Helix does not keep a timeseries database.
Globe is off the sidebar until you add it. It draws this host from the router's public WAN country, then country pins for established public TCP peers. Game ports Helix already knows (native and AMP) count as players; everything else public is outbound. Loopback, LAN, CGNAT, and overlay addresses stay off the map. Lookup happens in helix-privd; the browser never receives remote IPs.
Lines default to solid. Data motion is opt-in. Dots travel faster where more sessions or queued traffic share a country. That is not a bytes-per-second meter. Reduced-motion systems stay on solid lines. Country data comes from the public NRO whois country table (CC0); land outlines are Natural Earth 110m.
A Notes widget can hold up to eight named pages. Its settings control whether the active page can be edited without entering layout mode. Changes use the same debounced, revision-aware preference save as the rest of Home, with a browser fallback that retries if the server is temporarily unavailable.
Notes are application preferences, not an encrypted secret vault. Addresses and ordinary reminders are reasonable; passwords, private keys, access tokens, and recovery codes belong in a password manager.
The built-in themes are System, Midnight, OLED, and Light. Settings also exposes bounded accent, surface, and text controls with previews and a reset action. Helix validates contrast-sensitive values rather than accepting arbitrary CSS.
If you close a full-disk warning on Overview, a notice in the bell menu, or the Storage space-analyzer intro, Helix remembers that in this browser only. Other browsers and other people on this dashboard still see those banners. The disk is unchanged. Settings → Helix data → Show them again brings the banners back.
Settings → Helix data lists native servers Helix owns, imported connections it can see, and recoverable trash. Each native server has Start after the host boots: on means the game comes back after Linux or Docker restarts; off means it stays stopped until you press Start. That same checkbox is on by default when you create a server. It does not start or stop the server right now. This is not the Host integration toggle for the Helix dashboard containers.
