hausfold

haus

everyday

A Mac for someone who doesn't write code: a better menu bar, a search box that opens anything, and none of the developer tooling.

everyday is the same care, aimed at a machine that will never open a terminal. A quiet bar with the clock, the battery and the weather; a search box on ⌘Space that opens anything; a wallpaper and a set of colours that agree with each other. And none of the developer tooling: no compilers, no agents, nothing installed for a job this Mac isn't doing.

It is a whole answer, not a stripped-down one. Windows behave exactly the way they already do, because the fastest way to lose someone is to change what their machine does when they click.

curl -fsSL https://hausfold.co/everyday.sh | bash

The URL picks the desktop, so the installer won't ask which one you want. Install has the rest.

It needs an admin account, and the first setup takes a while

This is not a five-second install: it asks for your password once, downloads a few GB, and sets things up so it doesn't have to ask again. If you're doing it for someone else, do it while sitting next to them.

What's in it

the barA clock, battery and weather along the top edge: a better menu bar, not a new one
the launcher⌘Space opens a search box that finds and opens things
the shelfA place in the notch for files on their way somewhere else
FocusOne key to go quiet, and one to come back
the lookThe haus mark on your palette as a wallpaper, and apps themed to agree with it
a video playerIINA, which opens the formats Quick Look won't
a first lapOne prompt, once: press ⌘Space, type, hit return. That is the whole tutorial

The judgement calls

A desktop is a set of decisions somebody made on your behalf, so these are the four worth seeing before you install it. Every one of them is a line in your own file away.

Tiling is off. Tiling is good; remapping Caps-Lock to a leader key on someone else's Mac is not. Windows keep the behaviour they already know, which is also why this desktop claims no leader key at all.

The launcher is on. A search box that opens things is legible to anyone. It is the one power feature that needs no explanation.

The bar is on. A clock, a battery and the weather is a better menu bar, not a different way of thinking about the screen.

Developer tooling is off, and agents with it. Coding agents on a machine that ships no coding tools is a room enabling itself for nobody. If you want them, haus.ai.enable = true is the line.

If you used the old everyday preset

This is the same idea rebuilt as a whole desktop rather than a layer over another one, and two things it used to inherit are now deliberately off: the coding agents, and the Node toolchain that came with them. desktops/everyday.nix states every difference in full.

Where to go next

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