Isle

A notch-style island for the GNOME desktop.

Music with synced lyrics, calls, notifications, a focus timer, reminders, a calendar that tells you when to join a meeting, a clipboard shelf, Claude Code and Codex asking you right there, and an assistant that installs and fixes things with the AI you already use, living in a notch at the top of your screen.

Isle turns the centre of the top bar into a black notch. At rest it shows the time and what is going on (a song, a timer, a recording, or two of them at once). Rest the pointer on it and it opens with spring physics into a small panel with tabs for each page; passing over it on the way elsewhere leaves it closed. Alerts for volume, charging, Caps Lock and notifications appear in the same place instead of in the middle of the screen.

• Features
• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
• Settings
• Voice assistant
  • The conversation
• AI usage
• Resource usage
• Data & network
• Troubleshooting
• Uninstalling
• How it works
• Contributing
• Support
• License

Music. Spotify, YouTube in your browser, or any MPRIS player: cover art with the playing app's icon, a scrubber and controls. Volume and output switching are one click away.	Synced lyrics from LRCLIB: the line being sung large and bright, pauses as breathing dots. The island widens and takes the cover's colour; click a line to jump to it.
Calls in WhatsApp, Telegram, Meet or any app or browser: the closed island shows a green phone and how long the call has lasted. Open it to see the call live (you and whoever you call) while you work in other windows, mute your microphone, or jump back to the call.	Focus. A Pomodoro timer with breaks and Do Not Disturb while you focus: a ring with the time left, the work and break lengths to change with − and +, and Start. Its ring and time stay in the closed island; beside a song, its time sits next to the music bars.
Reminders, a plain list: add, rename in place, tick one off and it is struck through, then goes. A long one wraps over as many lines as it needs.	Shelf. A clipboard history of text, links, images and files (search, filter, pin; Super+V to paste), and a files tray: drop files on the island, then drag them into any app or click one to copy it, ready to paste into a chat.
Files tray. Files dropped on the island wait here, with their thumbnails, until you drag them into an app or click one to copy it.	Calendar. The month beside the chosen day's events. Shows your desktop calendars (Google and others through Online Accounts) and events you add in a line: "Dinner 8:00 pm". Five minutes before an event, the island reminds you, with Join when it has a Google Meet, Zoom, Teams or Webex link. Under them, the time in other cities: GNOME's world clocks.
Notifications. GNOME's notifications collect here as a plain list, newest first, with their buttons ("Reply", "Mark as read") under the pointer, Clear, and Do Not Disturb a click away.	Voice assistant. Press Super+I and ask, in English or Indonesian: play a song, find a file, put windows side by side, add a reminder, explain why the laptop is slow. It works as an agent: a request with several steps is done one after another, each step checked, with the AI you already use (Claude Code, Codex, Grok or Antigravity).
Installs and fixes things. "Install LibreOffice", "pasang codex": it checks what your Linux has, searches the web when unsure, and shows the one command it wants to run, with what to know (your password, a script from the web, removing files). Press Run or Deny. It runs in the background while you carry on, and the assistant checks it worked before saying so.	Speak or type, and talk it through. It listens as soon as it opens; start typing to type instead. Scroll up for the conversation so far; select text to copy it, + for a new one. The bot turns to the pointer, blinks, bounces with your voice and changes expression as it thinks and answers, and the light round the edge rises as you speak. Close the island and it carries on in the background.
A bot of your own. Eight shapes, from a circle to a cloud or a ghost, eleven colours or your own, softly shaded, and a glow round the island that matches it.	AI usage. How much of your Claude and ChatGPT plans' limits is used: one plan at a time with its logo, a bar per limit it has (5 hours, the week) and when each resets; scroll up or down, or click the dots, to switch. A warning comes as one nears its end. Only the ones you are signed in to show.
Alerts for volume, brightness, Caps Lock, charging, low battery, Bluetooth devices with their battery, going offline, reminders, meetings about to start, AI plan limits and GNOME notifications with their buttons, in the same place instead of the middle of the screen. Hold the pointer on one to keep it, with a × on its icon to put it away (or swipe up). Icons drawn in SF Symbols' manner move once as they appear: the bolt pulses, the bell sways, rings sweep and count up.	AI agents. When Claude Code or Codex asks permission to run something, answer from the island: Deny, Allow or, for Claude Code, Always. When one is done, the island says what it did. Nothing shows while you are in its window, and answering in its terminal works as before.

Also: privacy dots while the camera, microphone or screen sharing is in use, a recording timer with a stop button, and a slim glass top bar that leaves your windows uncovered.

• GNOME Shell 46 to 51 (Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.10, Fedora 40 to 45, Debian 13, …), on a 64-bit Intel or AMD PC (x86_64). Check with gnome-shell --version.
• curl, which most systems have. Install as yourself, not with sudo.
• For the voice assistant (optional): a microphone and one of Claude Code, Codex, Grok or Antigravity signed in (Codex and the npm install of Claude Code need Node.js 18 or newer); see Voice assistant.

1. Run this in a terminal:

   curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zickrian/isle/main/get.sh | bash

2. Log out and back in: GNOME Shell on Wayland only loads a new extension at login (on GNOME 46 to 48 with X11, press Alt+F2, type r and press Enter instead).

That's all. The script downloads the latest release, checks it, and installs it for your user only: no root, no compiler and no cloning needed. Run the same command again to update; your settings stay as you set them.

The installation guide goes through it step by step, with updating, uninstalling, installing offline and what to do if the island does not appear.

Ubuntu and Debian (.deb), Fedora (.rpm). Each release also has a system-wide package, for every user of the computer. Install it, log out and back in (GNOME Shell only finds a new extension at login), then turn Isle on once as each user, in the Extensions app or with gnome-extensions enable:

sudo apt install ./isle_*_amd64.deb        # Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, Debian 13
sudo dnf install ./isle-*.x86_64.rpm       # Fedora 40 and newer
# Log out and back in, then:
gnome-extensions enable isle@zickrian.github.io

Arch Linux. Isle is not in the AUR yet (yay -S isle-bin finds nothing). Build its package from the PKGBUILD in packaging/aur, made from the release tarball, or use the one-line install above:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zickrian/isle.git
cd isle/packaging/aur
makepkg -si
# Log out and back in, then:
gnome-extensions enable isle@zickrian.github.io

To update a package, install the new release's package the same way (or run makepkg -si again with the updated PKGBUILD); don't also run the command above, which would add a second copy in your home folder.

A copy installed with the command above, in your home folder, takes precedence over a system-wide package; isle-uninstall removes it and the package's takes over. Releases can be checked with gh attestation verify <file> --repo zickrian/isle (see SECURITY.md).

tar -xzf isle-*-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
cd isle-*-x86_64-linux
./install.sh

sudo apt install git build-essential pkg-config libgtk-4-dev cmake libclang-dev libvulkan-dev glslc
# Fedora: git gcc-c++ pkgconf gtk4-devel cmake clang-devel vulkan-loader-devel glslc
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
git clone https://github.com/zickrian/isle.git
cd isle
./install.sh

The island reopens on the page you picked last (for five minutes), or on what is live: a call, unseen notifications, music, a running timer. With two music players running, the music page shows the other one's icon to switch to it.

While a window is fullscreen (a video, a game), the island stays out of the way: alerts, notifications and reminders wait and show once it is gone, and a burst of notifications comes as one ("6 new notifications"), each still unread in the list. A reminder stays until you are back at the computer. While you share or record the screen, alerts leave out what notifications say, and the clipboard history stays hidden. If Isle's background service stops, a warning shows in the closed island; click it to start it again.

Click the gear right of the clock in the open island (or Isle's gear in the Extensions app):

• Island: the top bar on a slider from glass (default) to black, the island itself always black; which pages the open island has (Music, Notifications, Focus, Reminders, Shelf, Calendar, AI Usage) and whether it has the AI assistant at all; world clocks, and their cities; the closed island inside the bar or hanging below it; with more than one display, on the main one or the one you are using; opening when the pointer rests on it (and for how long) or only on a click.
• Alerts: apps' notifications in the island (or GNOME's own banners instead); volume and brightness; charging, network, Bluetooth and Caps Lock, each on its own; privacy dots, new songs, sounds; what Super+V opens (the clipboard history, or GNOME's calendar); lyrics online; a reminder before calendar events, and how many minutes before. Alerts other than a low battery are not shown while Do Not Disturb is on.
• Calls: show calls in the island, and the live preview of the call.
• Clipboard: turn the history on or off, clear it, and choose apps whose copies are never kept (password managers are on the list from the start).
• Focus timer: session and break lengths, Do Not Disturb while focusing.
• Assistant: the bot's look (shape, colour, glow, with a live preview); the assistant on or off, its shortcut, which AI answers and with which model (only those your plan includes, with your plan's name), speech recognition, language, and whether it may use the text you selected (off by default) or read your notifications; how long a quiet conversation is kept, and clearing it now.
• AI Usage: on or off, which plans to show, and when to warn; and under AI Agents, a switch for each of Claude Code and Codex that is installed (on by default; none listed when neither is).
• About: the version and whether it is up to date (with how to update, and the switch for asking GitHub once a day), help, a bug report to copy (isled --report), and resetting every setting.

Press Super+I (or the mic in the open island) and speak. The island listens until you pause, turns your words into text on this computer, then asks the AI you picked; it shows each step ("Searching ~/Downloads for “signature”…") and does what the answer asks.

It works as an agent: a request with several steps ("open Firefox, then put it on the left", "find my CV and open it", "open Spotify, play some jazz and turn the volume down to 30") is done one step after another, each step seeing what the last one did (whether the app opened, which windows are there). You can close the island while it works: it carries on in the background, with a small mic in the closed island, and the answer comes as an alert; click the island or press Super+I to watch it, and Stop to end it. Its answer's own actions run before it answers, so it never says "done" when a step failed: it tries another way, or says what did not work.

What it does: music (play, pause, a given song on Spotify), apps and windows (open, switch to, close, minimize, fullscreen, put side by side or in a 2×2 grid: "split Chrome and VS Code 50/50"), files and folders (find, open, show in Files), reminders, to-dos and calendar events (add, change, remove), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, volume, brightness, dark mode, Night Light, settings panels, screenshots, writing text where your cursor is, answering questions (with a web search when it needs fresh facts), telling you what makes the computer slow, and installing, removing or fixing software with a command you approve. Ask a follow-up while the answer shows, or later the same day: it remembers the conversation (see the conversation).

Installing and fixing things. Ask "install LibreOffice" and it looks first: which Linux this is, which ways to install it has (apt, dnf, pacman, zypper, Flatpak, Snap, npm), whether the app is already there, and when unsure, the vendor's own instructions on the web. Then the island shows a card with the one command it proposes, why, and what to know about it: Needs your password (it runs as root), Runs a script from the web, or Removes files or apps. Press Run (Enter) or Deny (Esc); with the island closed, the card comes as an alert. A command runs in the background as a systemd unit of its own, so you can close the island or lock the screen, and Isle follows it to its end, even after isled restarts (a command still running when you log out ends with your session); the card shows how long it has run and its last lines, and Stop ends it (for a package manager, press it twice: stopping one halfway can leave things half done). When it ends, the assistant checks that it worked (libreoffice --version) before saying so; denied, it does not try again. One command runs at a time, and nothing waits forever: an unanswered card is denied after 10 minutes, and a command is stopped after 30.

Set up:

1. Install and sign in to one AI command-line app (it uses your own plan):

   AI	Install	Sign in	Notes
   Claude Code	curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash (or npm i -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code)	run claude	Uses your Claude plan; Sonnet by default; Haiku is the fastest but follows the request's language and tools less reliably
   Codex (ChatGPT)	npm i -g @openai/codex	codex login	How Isle uses ChatGPT: your ChatGPT plan (Free works too, with lower limits), with the model your Codex uses
   Grok	curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash	grok login	Uses your Grok plan (Free works too); Isle runs it in its own folder, kept to answering
   Antigravity	its installer	run agy	Its terms bar third-party tools from the service; Isle only runs the official agy, at your own risk

   Settings → Assistant lists only the models your plan includes, by their full names, with your plan's name. If your plan stops including the one you picked (a subscription that lapsed), Isle answers with the plan's default and says so once, then goes back to your pick when the plan includes it again. Claude's Fable models are not offered: in the assistant they would use your usage credits without asking.

2. Set up speech recognition, once: press Set up when the assistant asks for it, or run ~/.local/bin/isle-setup-voice in a terminal (isle-setup-voice with a .deb, .rpm or AUR package; from the source folder: scripts/setup-voice.sh). It downloads the speech model chosen in Settings, small by default (265 MB; tiny 44 MB, base 82 MB, medium 823 MB; isle-setup-voice base names one and picks it in Settings), which isle-whisper runs with whisper.cpp: nothing else to install. On a computer with a graphics card (NVIDIA, AMD or Intel Arc, through Vulkan) it runs there, in about a second; otherwise on the processor, in several seconds (it needs AVX2: Intel since 2013, AMD since 2015). An older Isle's Python environment (up to 3 GB) is no longer needed: updating Isle moves you over and deletes it by itself, or run isle-setup-voice --remove-old.

3. Pick the AI in Settings → Assistant, or leave it on Automatic, which uses the first one you are signed in to: Claude Code, then Codex, then Antigravity. An AI installed later is found by itself.

4. Check with ~/.local/bin/isled --doctor (isled --doctor with a package): it lists speech recognition (the models downloaded, and the GPU or processor it runs on) and each AI, where it is installed and whether you are signed in, as Isle itself sees them. Isle finds AIs installed with npm (also a prefix of your own), nvm, volta, fnm, pnpm, bun, Homebrew, mise, asdf, Nix or their own installers, and takes what your login shell sets for them (CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, CODEX_HOME, an API key, a proxy), as code editors do.

Without any of them, Super+I says what to install, and the rest of Isle works as before.

Safety: the AI only answers. It cannot run commands or change files itself: Isle runs its actions, which are limited to the ones above. Each AI is started with only web search and reading pages: Claude Code with just its web tools, Codex with its shell, file, browser and computer-use tools off, and agy behind a hook that refuses anything else.

• Looking runs at once, without asking, but only programs on a fixed list that only read (uname, cat /etc/os-release, apt-cache policy, dpkg -s, rpm -q, dnf info, pacman -Qi, flatpak list, snap info, npm view, which, <program> --version, df, free…), each run directly with its arguments, never through a shell, and never with an option that would install, remove or change anything.
• Changing anything is a command you see in full and run yourself with Run. Isle starts exactly the command on the card and nothing else (GNOME Shell checks this before starting it); one that needs root asks with GNOME's password dialog, gets only the system's own folders on its PATH, and its output is written to its log as you, not as root. Commands that would wipe the system (rm -rf / or your home folder, mkfs, dd onto a disk, a fork bomb) are refused before you are even asked.
• Files: Isle searches your files by name for it, reads small text files you ask about, opens documents and media but never programs, and never looks in hidden folders that hold keys or passwords (.ssh, .gnupg, keyrings), even through a link. Secrets in a command's output (keys, tokens, passwords) are blanked before the AI sees it.
• Text from other apps (your selection, notifications, window titles, a command's output, web pages) is passed as data, never as instructions.

Resources: the speech model runs only while you speak (on at most half the processor's cores) and quits once your words are text. The AI starts as you open the assistant, so it answers sooner, and quits 3 minutes after your last request, taking anything it started with it. Both run at a lower priority than your apps, so the desktop stays smooth while they work.

What you said and what it answered show as a conversation: scroll up on the assistant, or click the line above the field. Select text to copy it, click a command to copy that. + starts a new conversation; Undo brings the last one back for 5 seconds. A conversation is kept until midnight at the latest, or until it has been quiet for 30 minutes or 2 hours if you choose so in Settings; then it is deleted, with the AI's own copy of it. Settings → Assistant → Clear the conversation now deletes it at once. Your voice is never kept: the recording lives in memory only until it is text. The conversation is kept in ~/.local/share/isle/chat.json, readable by you alone, and the AI's copy apart from your own chats with it.

Isle finds your plans from the apps you are signed in to: Claude with Claude Code's sign-in, and ChatGPT with Codex's. It shows each limit your plan has (a 5-hour window, the week, a model's week), when it resets, and warns at 80% and 95% (set in Settings). A plan you are not signed in to does not show at all.

Claude's numbers come from the same page Claude Code's /usage reads, and ChatGPT's from the one Codex's /status reads; neither is a documented API, so they may change. Isle asks each every ten minutes (at most every two while the Usage page is open), and not while the screen is locked. Offline, as at login before the network is up, it tries again within a minute; when Claude's server fails it waits longer each time. It never signs in or refreshes a sign-in itself, and with usage turned off it asks nothing at all. When ChatGPT can't be asked (offline, or Codex's sign-in ran out), its numbers come from Codex's own logs, as of your last use of Codex.

AI agents. Isle connects to Claude Code and Codex when it finds them, also when you install one later, and says so once. It adds its hooks to ~/.claude/settings.json (PermissionRequest, Notification and Stop) and to ~/.codex/hooks.json (PermissionRequest and Stop); Codex asks once, at its next start, whether to trust them (or trust them in /hooks), and a Codex older than 0.124 gets notify in its config.toml instead, for done alerts only. Each hook runs isled --agent-hook, which asks the island and waits for your answer. With no answer (the alert put away, the agent's window in front, Do Not Disturb, isled not running) it says nothing, and the agent asks in its terminal as it would without Isle; answering in Claude Code's terminal first takes the alert away. Always keeps the rule Claude Code itself suggests, where it suggests it (usually the project's .claude/settings.local.json). Your own hooks and settings are kept as they are; turning a switch off in Settings → AI Usage → AI Agents, or uninstalling Isle, takes out Isle's entries only. Nothing leaves the computer.

Isle is built to run all day unnoticed. Measured on Ubuntu 24.04 with GNOME 46 (version 1.0.0):

Animations run on the display's frame clock only while a spring moves and stop when it settles: closed and idle, Isle draws no frames at all, and over 40 openings, page changes, lyrics and alerts 99.8% of frames came in time for 60 Hz. The clock wakes once a minute, lyrics exactly when the next line starts, and pages only tick while they are open. The call preview reuses the window's picture already on the graphics card, so it costs about nothing, and only exists while the Call page is open; Isle never opens the camera or the microphone itself.

Isle has no server and no telemetry; your clipboard history, reminders, events, timer and the assistant's chats stay in ~/.local/share/isle, and speech is recognised on this computer. It goes online only for synced lyrics (LRCLIB) and cover art, once per song (lyrics can be turned off in Settings); your Claude plan's usage (api.anthropic.com, with Claude Code's own sign-in); a look for a newer Isle on GitHub at most once a day (also in Settings); the speech model, downloaded once from Hugging Face when you set up voice; and the voice assistant, whose requests go to the AI you picked and may include a web search by it. A meeting's link is read from the event on this computer, and only opened when you click Join. Copies from password managers are never kept, and only GNOME Shell may read the clipboard history from Isle's service or steer its assistant. The call preview is drawn by GNOME Shell from what is on screen and never recorded. SECURITY.md lists exactly what is sent where, and the assistant's safety rules.

The island does not appear after installing. Log out and back in (on Wayland this is required once). Then check that it is enabled: gnome-extensions info isle@zickrian.github.io.

Music or lyrics do not show. Check that the background service runs: systemctl --user status isled, and read its log with journalctl --user -u isled -f. Songs LRCLIB does not know show "No lyrics found"; a busy service retries on its own.

Files cannot be dragged in or out. The release package includes the drag-and-drop helper; when building from source, install libgtk-4-dev (Fedora: gtk4-devel) and run ./install.sh again.

Another extension covers the island. Extensions that restyle or move the top bar (Dash to Panel, Hide Top Bar, other islands) can get in the way; turn them off in the Extensions app.

The voice assistant does not answer. Run ~/.local/bin/isled --doctor: it says what is missing (speech recognition, an AI, or its sign-in) and what to run.

Something else. Run ~/.local/bin/isled --report (or Settings → About → Copy a bug report): it gathers the versions, what works and recent logs, without your data. Please open an issue and paste it there.

With a .deb, .rpm or AUR package, Isle's commands are in /usr/bin: run them by name alone (isled --doctor, isled --report).

~/.local/bin/isle-uninstall

(or ./uninstall.sh from the release package or the source folder). This removes the extension, the programs, the service, the font, the voice assistant's speech recognition and Isle's caches, and lifts a battery charge limit Isle set; it also takes Isle's hooks out of Claude Code's and Codex's settings. Your tasks, calendar events, clipboard history, shelf and timer settings stay in ~/.local/share/isle until you delete them.

Remove Isle this way, not with the Extensions app's Remove button, which deletes only the extension and leaves isled and its hooks behind. For a system-wide package, each user runs isled --unhook-all first (and isle-charge-limit 100 if the assistant set a battery charge limit), then remove it with sudo apt remove isle, sudo dnf remove isle or sudo pacman -R isle-bin.

┌────────────────── isled (Rust) ──────────────────┐
│ MPRIS · lyrics · timer · tasks · calendar · shelf│
│ UPower · NetworkManager · BlueZ                  │
│ voice assistant · AI usage · AI agents · meetings│
│            exposed on D-Bus (zbus)               │
└────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
           ┌─────────────┴──────────────┐
  GNOME Shell extension (JS)      isle-shelf (Rust, GTK 4)
  draws the island and its        drag-and-drop window laid
  animations                      over the files tray

GNOME Shell extensions are written in JavaScript, and on Wayland only the shell can draw into the top bar. So the extension only draws, and everything else lives in Rust behind a D-Bus API.

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to build, test and send changes, and CHANGELOG.md for what changed. Everyone taking part follows the Code of Conduct; please report security problems privately as described in SECURITY.md.

Isle is free and always will be. If it makes your desktop nicer, you can buy me a coffee. A star, a bug report or telling a friend helps just as much.

Copyright © 2026 zickrian

Isle is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

The bundled Inter typeface (data/fonts) is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Lyrics come from LRCLIB. The Claude and OpenAI logos on the AI usage page come from Simple Icons (CC0); they are trademarks of Anthropic and OpenAI, shown only to name their plans. The assistant's face takes its expressions from bloub by Jérémy Perret, under the MIT License (notice).

The demo video shows "Clouds" by Tibor Mokanszki from the Ubuntu 24.04 wallpapers, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the video is shared under the same licence. Its songs, lyrics, notifications and events are made up.