Noctalia plugin

The Noctalia plugin shows what agents do on your desktop while they do it. It needs Noctalia 5.3 or newer and a niri-computer-use with the watch command.

• Bar. A robot that is dim while no agent holds the desktop. While one drives, it breathes in your accent colour, with the agent’s name beside it. It takes your theme’s tertiary colour while an agent asks for the desktop, and its error colour while agents are stopped. Its tooltip says who, where, the last call, and how many agents are connected and how many of them run an old build. Click it for the panel, right-click it to stop agents, or to resume them once stopped.
• Panel. Who drives, in which project and for how long, every agent connected to this desktop with the driver first (sessions of one agent in one project share a row that counts them, with their PIDs in its tooltip; past three rows, only the first shows and and N more unfolds the rest until the panel next opens), a Stop button beside them while an agent holds the desktop, for five minutes after it gives the desktop back (agents often take it again before asking you something), and while watch is down and the plugin can’t tell, a gear that opens the plugin’s settings, and the last 50 calls in words, such as Typed 12 characters and pressed Enter or Pressed a toggle button; a Noctalia command reads as Noctalia describes it, such as Toggle caffeine (idle inhibitor), or names the plugin an event went to. An agent’s consecutive key presses, each within 30 seconds of the last, share one row, such as Pressed 4 keys, with the keys under it. It opens on the newest call and follows new ones; scroll up to read older calls, and Latest takes you back. A failed call shows its error’s name. Resume stays disabled while input may be stuck, and the panel says to run niri-computer-use recover. An agent still running a build that an update replaced is marked old build, and the list’s heading says once how many to restart.
• Glow. A desktop widget the size of your output that draws a soft frame behind your windows, so it shows in niri’s gaps. It breathes while an agent drives, holds the tertiary colour while one asks, and is invisible otherwise.
• Notifications. When an agent takes the desktop, with its project, when agents are stopped, when input may be stuck, when an agent is left on a replaced build, and when an update replaced an agent’s server and its calls fail with engine_lost or engine_unavailable. That last one comes once per agent session, at its first such failure, and names the agent and says to restart it; its later failures of that kind don’t notify. The same errors from a server of the installed build, such as after an engine crash or while another agent holds the desktop, count as failed actions, since restarting wouldn’t help. An agent that gives the desktop back and takes it again within five minutes, as agents do before asking you something, is announced once. What the plugin finds when it starts, such as an agent already driving, is shown but not announced, except stuck input. Each but the ones for stuck input, old builds and a replaced server’s lost engine can be turned off in the plugin’s settings. Two more can be turned on: giving the desktop back, and failed actions, which never include an agent’s own mistakes such as invalid arguments, nor the lost engine of a replaced server. Only stuck input, and a Stop or Resume that failed, are sent at critical urgency; the rest, failed actions included, at normal urgency, so Noctalia shows them as ordinary toasts.

The project is the last part of the agent’s working directory, so two Claude Code sessions in different repositories are told apart. The plugin shows only what the audit log holds: never typed text, window titles or clipboard contents.

Install it

The install script installs the plugin from the same release as the binary, so the two always speak the same watch format, and links it into Noctalia’s plugin directory when noctalia is on PATH. Then enable it:

noctalia msg plugins enable ayagmar/niri-computer-use

From a clone of the repository, link the plugin yourself and enable it:

ln -s "$PWD/noctalia/niri-computer-use" ~/.local/share/noctalia/plugins/niri-computer-use
noctalia msg plugins enable ayagmar/niri-computer-use

Noctalia keeps the enabled plugins in ~/.local/state/noctalia/settings.toml, not in your config.toml. Then add the plugin’s widget to a bar and its glow to the desktop in Noctalia’s settings. The panel opens from the bar, or with:

noctalia msg panel-toggle ayagmar/niri-computer-use:panel

Settings

niri-computer-use binary is empty by default: the plugin then runs niri-computer-use from PATH, then ~/.local/bin and ~/.cargo/bin, since Noctalia’s PATH often has neither. Set it to use another build. The other settings turn each notification on or off and set the glow’s width. The bar widget has two of its own: whether it shows while no agent drives, and whether it shows the agent’s name.

What it says when it can’t watch

The panel says	Why	What to do
niri-computer-use not found	None of the places above has it	Install it, or set its path
This niri-computer-use has no watch command	The binary is older than watch	Update it, or set the path of a build that has it
niri-computer-use watch failed, with an error	watch exited, such as without a niri socket	The error, up to its first three lines, says why; the plugin tries again every 15 seconds
Not watching	watch printed nothing for 15 seconds	It is started again within 15 seconds
Starting, with an error	watch exited after it started, such as when it couldn’t write a line	The error, up to its first three lines, says why; it is started again within 15 seconds

How it works

The plugin’s service runs niri-computer-use watch and reads its JSON lines: the lease holder, the stop flag, the input-dirty marker and each call the audit log records. The bar, the panel and the glow draw what the service publishes. Stop and Resume run niri-computer-use stop and niri-computer-use resume, the commands your stop key runs, and a failure shows as a notification with the command’s output.