Shelf

You know the dance: drag a file, realise the window you wanted is buried under four others, let go, dig it out, drag again. The Shelf room installs perch, which ends it: start dragging anything, flick up to the notch, and a small shelf drops down to catch it. Pile in as much as you like, from as many places as you like, then grab any tile and carry the whole group to its real home in one motion.

This page is the room: the wiring, the one option, and what a rebuild does. The app itself is documented in its own tree.

Enable it

haus.perch.enable = true;

haus rebuild

Perch is copied to /Applications and kept current with the rest of the house. Standalone and in-the-house are the same app: if you already installed it with brew install --cask hausfold/tap/perch, letting the room own it is the upgrade.

Configure it

There is one setting, and it's about colour:

haus.perch.followSystemAppearance = true;

With it on, the shelf follows macOS Light/Dark itself (no rebuild, no relaunch) at your haus.theme.contrast, rather than being pinned to haus.theme.flavor like every other themed tool. Perch has no theme picker of its own (a five-second surface has nowhere to put one), so this is the only word on its colours.

Works with

• the Appearance room: the shelf takes your palette and contrast, unless you hand the polarity to macOS with followSystemAppearance.

Permissions and side effects

This room grants nothing, because perch asks for nothing: no Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording, no Dock icon, no telemetry. There is no permission step in a rebuild for it, which is unusual enough here to be worth saying.

One macOS setting fights it, and haus can't fix it for you: System Settings ▸ Desktop & Dock ▸ "Drag windows to top of screen to enter Mission Control". macOS arms that top-edge trigger for the whole of any drag, files included, and it fires over the same band the shelf lives in. Leave it on and the Dock steals the drop. Install has it too, for a Mac without haus.

Remove it

haus.perch.enable = false;

The room stops installing and updating it. The copy already at /Applications/Perch.app stays until you delete it; a rebuild never removes an app from your Applications folder behind your back.

Options

Every setting, with types and defaults: haus.perch.