trill

no noise, just a trill

your notifications, without the noise — a native, local, scriptable visual layer for macOS.

_{pre-release · trill is still in the incubator. every path that could lose your work is either reversible by design or stops to ask you first — that's the intent, not a warranty. run it on a machine you can afford to rebuild, and tell us what breaks.}

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A cat doesn't meow at everything. A trill is the small chirred note it makes in passing — enough to register that something happened, not enough to stop anyone's afternoon. That's trill: a quiet notification compositor that draws small, flat, silent banners — and gives every script, tool, and nebelhaus app one visual language for "something happened."

It is not a drop-in replacement for Notification Center, because Apple doesn't sell that entitlement. It's the honest version: a compositor trill fully owns, fed by providers — your own tools cleanly today, mirrored system notifications experimentally tomorrow.

why trill

• scriptable end to end — trill send --title "deploy landed" from any shell, CI job, or nix rebuild. One JSON line in, one banner out. No SDK.
• quiet by design — the trill is the cat's, not the speaker's: there are no sound APIs anywhere in the binary. Flat surface, a few points of motion (none under Reduce Motion), hover to hold.
• a stack, not a spreadsheet — banners deal downward from the top-right as overlapping cards. A burst on one --thread stays one card with a count; hover it and the card opens into the list of what folded in — as many lines as the screen has room for, each one a button for its own event.
• rules, not settings mazes — ~/.config/trill/rules.json: route a source to banner / inbox / digest / drop; quiet hours; critical punches through. Hot-reloaded on save.
• resilient compositor — panels are disposable; the queue is the truth. Unplug a display mid-burst and nothing is lost. A provider dying can't take rendering down; it re-probes and backs off on its own.
• native and tiny — one Swift LSUIElement binary that is both daemon and CLI. No Electron, no telemetry, no cloud, no login.

the shape

trill CLI      pounce/perch     usernoted db (experimental)
    │             │                │ read-only, schema-probed
 SocketProvider   │          SystemMirrorProvider
    └─────────────┴────────────────┘
                  ▼
          EventRepository (actor: normalize · dedupe · persist · supervise)
                  ▼
          PolicyEngine (rules.json: banner / inbox / digest / drop · quiet hours)
                  ▼
          BannerQueue (coalescing · hover-pause/expand · capacity)
                  ▼
          BannerWindowSystem (NSPanel per card · stacked · all Spaces · over fullscreen)

quick taste

trill send --title "Landing page shipped" \
           --body "Preview promoted to production" \
           --source deploy --symbol checkmark.circle --thread deploys

echo '{"title":"Backup complete","body":"3.8 GB copied","source":"backups","urgency":"low"}' \
  | trill send --json

trill ping   # is the daemon up?

trill doctor            # which listed apps does macOS still notify for itself?
trill doctor --all      # …check every app on the Mac, not just the listed ones
trill doctor --notify   # …and put the findings on screen, click to be walked through

// ~/.config/trill/rules.json
{
  "rules": [
    { "match": { "source": "slack", "titleContains": "mentioned" }, "delivery": "banner" },
    { "match": { "source": "slack" }, "delivery": "digest", "digest": "work" },
    { "match": { "source": "ads" }, "delivery": "drop" }
  ],
  "quietHours": { "startMinute": 1320, "endMinute": 420 }
}

what about other apps' notifications?

Three lanes, in order of honesty:

1. First-party (shipping): anything local speaks the socket. Nebelhaus apps, scripts, CI — clean, supported, forever.
2. System Mirror (experimental, off by default): reads the usernoted store read-only under Full Disk Access and redraws other apps' banners. Undocumented surface — a schema probe disables it safely when macOS moves. trill stays fully useful without it.
3. Suppressing Apple's own banners is Focus + per-app settings — trill deep-links you there but never pretends to own that dial.

trill doctor — the duplicate-banner check

Mirroring an app macOS is also drawing means seeing everything twice, so trill can at least tell you which apps those are. trill doctor reads Apple's own per-app notification preferences (read-only, and undocumented — see NotificationSettingsAudit) and reports every listed app that still has Desktop ticked or Play sound on. Exit code 4 means it found some, so a rebuild hook can gate on it.

Those preferences live in an Apple group container, which is TCC-protected — so doctor needs Full Disk Access, the same grant System Mirror wants. Without it there is no answer to give, and trill gives that one: can't tell, exit code 5. A check that quietly exited 0 while blind would make every un-granted Mac look clean.

"Listed" means the bundle-id-shaped source values in your rules.json; --all widens it to every app on the Mac, and naming bundle ids explicitly narrows it.

--notify puts the findings on screen as banners with one action — Silence Native Banners. Clicking one opens System Settings and floats a helper panel beside it: the app's row as macOS draws it (Apple dropped per-app anchors from that deep link, so it always lands at the top of the pane and finding the row is the real work), one sentence naming what's left to change, and a replica that animates the clicks — untick Desktop, turn Play sound for notification off.

Done moves to the next app. trill asks rather than watches because it can't rely on watching: the store needs Full Disk Access, and on a Mac that hasn't granted it there is nothing to observe. Where trill can read, the panel ticks apps off by itself as macOS agrees — the row's subtitle shortens, the sentence narrows to what's left, and the replica drops the step you've already done.

The helper only ever walks the apps the audit that opened it named — the banner carries them with it, so a summary banner standing for four listed apps still walks those four and not the sixty-odd others macOS holds preferences for. trill asks you to silence what you told it to redraw; it does not ask you to switch macOS's notifications off wholesale. Widening that is --all, and it takes typing --all.

Note that the pane changed shape in macOS 26 (Tahoe): the old None/Banners/Alerts radio is now a Desktop checkbox plus a Temporary/Persistent choice that only applies while Desktop is ticked. Notification Center and Lock Screen stay ticked — trill redraws the banner, it doesn't replace the notification. Same panel shape as the Full Disk Access assistant, and the same promise: trill opens the pane, it never writes the setting. There's no API to change another app's notification preferences, and silently rewriting a pane the user believes only they control isn't a trade this app makes.

See ARCHITECTURE.md for the invariants and PRD.md for the milestones.

status

Pre-release scaffold. The first-party pipeline (socket → rules → banners → inbox) is the v1 target; System Mirror ships only after its feasibility spike answers the questions in the PRD.

MIT. Part of the hausfold family.