Onyx 0.20

Onyx 0.20

Before you update

• Update every Mac that shares a home host. 0.20 adds hosts and
  settings to the shared state, and an Onyx older than 0.20 trims fields it
  doesn't know when it writes the file back. From 0.20 on, they're kept.
• Reinstall the bridge on your hosts when CONNECTIONS says "update
  available" (bridge protocol 5, below).

Finding what Onyx can do

• What's New. After an update, Onyx shows a card once listing what
  arrived since you last looked, with "Show me" for the features it can put
  on screen. It's in the Help menu and the command palette afterwards. New
  installs get the tour instead.
• Tips where features live. A one-line NEW tip appears where a new
  feature is used: in the file browser ("⌘V pastes files copied in
  Finder"), on an open file, in the monitor's agenda pane, and in the
  status bar under the terminal. Each place shows one tip at a time. A tip
  goes away for good once you use the feature or close it, in every
  window.
• More of the command palette finds features by what they do: today's
  calendar in the monitor, the file browser as a tree, cycling the side
  panel's width, What's New and the walkthrough.

Shared state and your other Macs

• API tokens are in the Keychain now, not in Onyx's preferences file.
  Your GitHub, GitLab, Timing and flowtree tokens move over the first time
  they're used. They stay on this Mac, and they still never travel in the
  shared state.
• More of your settings follow you between Macs through the home host:
  the PR draft filter, which reminder lists show and whether only items
  due soon do, the agenda pane, the extra clocks and the 12-hour clock,
  the GitHub repos and GitLab projects (with their usernames and "mine
  only"), the flowtree controller, and the first window's Timing projects.
  Window layout, where alerts go and anything else about one desk stay on
  each Mac. A Mac syncing settings for the first time adopts the ones
  already on the host rather than overwriting them.
• A copy of the shared state written by a newer Onyx is no longer
  trimmed by an older one. Fields and settings it doesn't know are kept.
• A built-in SSH client. Settings → Hosts → SSH client can move
  shared-state sync — or every remote call except terminals: git, files,
  stats, docker — onto Onyx's own SSH client instead of OpenSSH. It reads your ~/.ssh/config and
  known_hosts, signs in with an Ed25519 or ECDSA key (not RSA, not through
  ssh-agent), and refuses a host reached through ProxyJump rather than
  connecting around it. OpenSSH stays the default.

Hosts

• Reach a host through another. Settings → Hosts → edit a host →
  Reach through picks any host you've already added as its tunnel
  host. Host, port and user are then as the tunnel host sees them — a name
  or address on its network. The connection rides the tunnel host's
  existing connection, so the tunnel host still gets no more than its two.
  A tunneled host waits while its tunnel host is down or paused, and is
  never tried directly. Chains work (A through B through C); the picker
  leaves out choices that would loop. The host list shows "via ",
  and says so when a tunnel host has been removed. Key setup goes through
  the tunnel too. The built-in SSH client doesn't follow tunnels yet;
  those hosts stay on OpenSSH.
• Removing a host no longer clears every favorite. It kept only the
  favorites it could match to a session's internal id, which none of them
  were since favorites moved to user@host keys — so removing any host
  emptied the bar, and a paused or offline host's favorites went with it.
  Now only the removed host's own favorites go.

Page watches

• The "512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio" preset is gone. That option has
  shipped. A watch you made from it stays in your list until you delete
  it.

Side panel

• The divider shows it can be dragged. It has a grip, lights up under
  the pointer, and says what it does when hovered. Double-click resets
  the panel to its default width.
• Each window remembers its panel width across launches, on this Mac.
  ⌘\ still steps through preset widths, and the window remembers those
  too.

Claude sessions

• A Claude started with su - or sudo -iu inside your tmux is listed
  under its tmux session instead of just the machine name. Switching
  accounts hides tmux from the agent's hooks, so the bridge sends its
  process ancestry and Onyx asks your tmux which pane it's in. Hosts need
  the new bridge (protocol 5), so they show "update available" until
  reinstalled. OnyxMCP --origin shows what a hook on that host reports.

Timing

• Agent hours beside your own. With a flowtree controller set up
  (Settings), the monitor's Timing section adds an agents column: the
  wall-clock time flowtree jobs ran this week across every workstream, per
  day, and the 4-week and 30-day averages. It has its own color and icon
  and sits behind a divider. Simple mode gets an agents tile at the end
  of the bottom strip.

  • It isn't drawn in the bar chart. Jobs in parallel each count in full,
    so agents can log far more than 24 hours in a day, and one scale for
    both would flatten your bars.
  • Days are counted in this Mac's time zone, so they line up with
    Timing's. A job that runs past midnight is split between the days.
    Jobs still running count their time so far. A job whose worker has
    gone silent stops counting at its last heartbeat.
  • Needs a controller with GET /api/stats/daily. An older controller
    shows a one-line note instead of zeros.

• Up to three Timing.app projects at once. Settings → Monitor → Filter
  Projects now takes up to three top-level projects, in the order you
  choose them (each chip shows its place). Each one gets its own bars and
  numbers:

  • The week chart has one bar per project for each day, side by side,
    each split by that project's subprojects as before. A thin strip in
    the project's color under each bar, matching the dots in the header,
    tells them apart.
  • The legend is the union of every selected project's subprojects (and
    the projects themselves, when time is logged to them directly), most
    time first, whichever project it's under. It wraps onto more lines
    when it needs to.
  • The numbers are columns: one per project plus a total, each with
    the week's hours above its hours per day (with the 4-week and 30-day
    averages in small type), and the column's label underneath, so it
    can't be confused with the legend's subproject names. Fewer projects
    means fewer, wider columns. One project gets a single column, since
    its total would repeat it.
  • In the simple layout, the corner widget repeats once per project,
    with the project's name above it. Every tile has its colored bar,
    including a project whose time is all in one subproject, where the
    bar is solid. It used to appear only when there was more than one
    part.

  "All" still clears the selection, and a single project looks exactly as
  it did before. An existing single-project filter carries over.

• Projects with no color in Timing keep the same fallback color: from
  launch to launch, and between a bar and its legend dot. The fallback
  used to come from a hash that changes every launch, and the chart and
  legend each chose their own.

• The simple monitor's charts stay above the bottom strip. They were
  sized without counting their own titles and spacing, so they ran down
  behind the strip's text. With the memory chart on, the Timing tiles'
  labels were half covered. Each chart's full height is now counted, and
  nothing in the chart area can draw past it.

• Fleet charts per machine go side by side past three machines. In the
  simple layout, four or more machines used to be stacked in one column
  that never fit the screen. Now a column holds at most three machines:
  four are split 2 + 2, five are split 3 + 2.

• The simple monitor's bottom strip shows PR jobs in flight, as well as
  containers. A PR with a job running or queued gets a pill with its
  branch and the job's name, colored as in the side panel: blue for
  running, amber for queued. Click a pill to open the PR. The strip's
  three slots go to whatever matters most right now. A container doing
  real work (about a third of a core or more) comes before a PR's job,
  and a PR's job comes before an idle container. A PR the side panel is
  already listing doesn't take a slot. Slots don't flip back and forth
  when two things are about equally busy. A long branch name is shortened
  from the prefixes first: experiment/quant-welfare/phase-1 shows as
  expe/quan/phase-1. If it still doesn't fit, it is cut inside the last
  part: feature/delta-consolidation shows as feat/delta-…dation.

• D in the detailed monitor switches to simple mode and opens the side
  panel. It used to toggle the side panel without leaving the detailed
  layout, where there is no side panel. The change couldn't be seen, and
  the panel was off the next time simple mode came up. R (reminders due
  soon) likewise does nothing in simple mode, which has no list for it to
  filter. The hint line under the clock lists only the keys that do
  something in the current layout.

• The side panel's PR lines no longer name the workflow, only the
  running or queued job, leaving more room for the branch. Hover a PR line
  to see the workflow.

• Renaming a session no longer leaves a copy under its old name. The
  terminal stays attached through the rename and keeps its activity clock.
  Before, the old name stayed in the session list beside the new one.

• Shift-Return makes a new line in Claude Code instead of submitting.
  Onyx now sends Shift-Return as ESC CR (Meta-Return), the sequence
  Claude Code reads as a line break. It passes through tmux unchanged. In
  a zsh prompt it adds a line to the command being edited.

• ⌃⇥ cycles tmux sessions, and ⇧⇥ now goes to the terminal by
  default, so Claude Code's permission-mode switch works out of the box.
  This applies to existing installs too — if you want ⇧⇥ to cycle
  sessions again, turn it back on in Settings → General → Keyboard.

• Paste files into the file browser. Copy files or folders in Finder
  with ⌘C, click into the file browser, and press ⌘V. They upload to the
  folder being shown, the same as dropping them there. ⌘V with text on
  the clipboard works as it always has.

• The monitor's agenda pane can show today's calendar instead of
  Reminders. Press A with the monitor up, or click CALENDAR in the
  pane's header. That's the reminders column in the detailed layout, and
  the list in simple mode's side panel. In simple mode, A also opens the
  side panel. The detailed layout shows the whole day, with past events
  dimmed and the current event highlighted. Simple mode shows only what's
  left of the day. Onyx asks for calendar access the first time you switch
  to the calendar, not at launch.

• Choose which calendars the agenda pane shows. Settings → Reminders
  & Calendar lists every calendar this Mac can see, grouped by account,
  each with a checkbox. All are on by default, and a calendar added later
  shows up without a trip to Settings. The choice is per Mac. If the list
  is empty, the pane now says so: Onyx sees only the calendars in
  Calendar.app, so a Google or Outlook calendar you only use in a browser
  needs adding in System Settings → Internet Accounts. Calendars that
  arrived after access was granted no longer stay invisible until a
  relaunch.

• Edit files from the file browser. Open a text file and click Edit.
  It opens in a full-window editor; ⌘S saves it back to the host. Esc
  closes, and asks first if there are unsaved changes. Before saving, Onyx
  checks whether the file changed on the host since you opened it. If it
  did, you choose: overwrite it, or reload and lose your edits. A save
  writes into the existing file, so it keeps its permissions and
  ownership, and a symlink stays a symlink. The new bytes are on the
  host's disk before the file is touched. Line endings and every other
  byte you didn't edit are kept exactly. Files over 2 MB, or that aren't
  UTF-8 text, open read-only with an explanation.

• The file browser can show a folder as a tree. Click the tree button
  in its toolbar. Folders open in place when clicked, and each folder's
  contents are fetched the first time you open it. Files open as usual.
  "Open as folder" in a folder's right-click menu makes it the folder
  shown. The choice is remembered.

• Download from the file viewer gets the right file when the file was
  opened from search. It used to look for a file of that name in the
  folder being shown.