Nook

Stop squinting at "Desktop 4" trying to remember which one had your email open.

Nook is a tiny macOS menu bar app that lets you give your virtual desktops real names — "Coding", "Email", "That One With The Tabs I'm Afraid To Close" — and then shows them where you actually look: in Mission Control and (on notched MacBooks) right under the notch.

Because macOS gives you eight desktops and zero ways to tell them apart. 🤷

See it in action

Mission Control strip (three-finger swipe up — first stage):

Mission Control expanded (mouse moves up — second stage):

Notice how the named Spaces show their names and the unnamed ones politely fall back to "Desktop 5", "Desktop 6"... Nook never breaks the muscle memory.

Features

• 🏷️ Names in Mission Control — both stages of the trackpad gesture and the hot-corner / F3 view.
• 🎩 Hover-activated notch — on notched MacBooks, peek the active Space's name without opening Mission Control.
• 🖥️ Per-display tracking — each screen tracks its own active Space.
• ✏️ Rename inline — right-click (or Ctrl-click) a label in Mission Control.
• 🧠 Collision-safe — two Spaces named "Coding" become "Coding 1" and "Coding 2".
• 🆔 UUID-anchored — names follow their Space through reorders, reboots, and the occasional Mission Control mood swing.

Status

🚧 Alpha. This is my second-ever project and very much open source — expect rough edges, weird AX behavior on macOS versions I haven't tested, and the occasional "wait, why did the label do that?" moment. Issues and PRs are extremely welcome; tell me what broke and on what hardware.

Requirements

• macOS 13 Ventura or later
• Accessibility permission (Nook will ask on first launch — this is how it reads the Mission Control layout)

Install

Just ask Claude to do it :)

How it works (the 30-second version)

Nook polls the macOS Accessibility tree to find Mission Control's layout, then floats a transparent overlay window on top with your custom names. It uses a SpaceStore actor backed by UserDefaults to persist the name ↔ Space-UUID mapping, so names survive reboots and reorders.

There's no private API spelunking, no kernel extensions, no daemons — just AX, AppKit, and a healthy amount of "let's see what happens when I swipe with three fingers."

Contributing

1. Read CONTEXT.md for the domain vocabulary (Space vs Desktop vs Display — they mean specific things).
2. Skim PRD.md for the full product spec.
3. Architecture decisions live in docs/adr/.
4. Open a PR or an issue. Don't be shy — this is alpha, every report helps.

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE.

The notch-activation surface in Nook/Notch/ is derived from mew-notch (GPL-3.0) by Monu Kumar. Per GPL copyleft, the combined work is now distributed under GPL-3.0; the pre-GPL MIT history is preserved in NOTICE.