The Quiet Shell & the Desk

You will learn

• What the quiet chrome posture is and how to switch into it
• The disclosure ladder: corners, edges, chords, and Esc
• The Desk — your bounded home canvas — and how pinning works
• The SurfaceDock, and how it maps to the pinned shell’s tray

Overview

The quiet shell inverts the calm shell’s composition: at rest the screen is just your work — a document, a database, or the Desk canvas — and the chrome is summoned, never pinned. Glyph clusters sit dimmed in the corners; the navigator and the contextual canvas slide in from the edges; the dock expands from the bottom-right the way devtools always has. Nothing is removed — every drawer is reachable three ways: pointer (hover an edge, or swipe on a phone), keyboard chord, or the ⌘K palette.

Switch postures any time with ⌘K → “View: Quiet chrome” (and back with “View: Pinned chrome”). The setting is per-device and changes nothing about your data or routes.

The disclosure ladder

Level	What you see	How you got here
L0	Bare surface, dimmed glyphs	Rest state
L1	Glyphs lit	Pointer near an edge, or a touch
L2	One overlay open	Edge hover-dwell, swipe, ⌘B / ⌘\ / ⌘J / ⌘K
L3	Pinned chrome	”View: Pinned chrome” or the workbench grid

Esc always walks down one rung. Dismissing an overlay returns you to the bare surface; it never dead-ends.

Surface	Pointer / touch	Chord	Palette
Navigator	left edge hover / swipe	⌘B	Toggle left panel
Context	right edge hover / swipe	⌘\	Toggle right panel
Dock	corner launcher / FAB	⌘J	Dock: <panel>
Palette	corner search glyph	⌘K	—

The Desk

The Desk is a personal home canvas with a deterministic, identity-derived id — it is created the first time you visit it, and the same identity gets the same Desk on every device. It is bounded but growable: panning clamps near your content (you can’t strand yourself in empty space), and the board grows as cards land outside it. Fit to content (Ctrl/Cmd 1) is the home anchor.

Build your workspace by pinning:

• Drag anything from the navigator onto the Desk.
• Pin to Desk from a document via ⌘K, or the desk icon that appears when you hover a navigator row. Pins queue up and land the next time the Desk is on screen — you don’t have to be looking at it.
• Go to Desk (g k) from anywhere.

Pinned cards are live views of the real nodes — edit the source and the card follows. On a phone the Desk renders as an ordered list (reading order of the board), which is also how screen readers traverse it.

The SurfaceDock

The bottom-right launcher is the devtools grammar for everyone: a single glyph that expands into the hero panels (Shelf, Capture, Notifications) with the rest behind More and the palette. It reuses the pinned shell’s bottom tray state, so ⌘J toggles the same panels in either posture. Plugins add panels through the surfaceDock contribution point in @xnetjs/plugins.

Rollout

Quiet chrome ships opt-in. New identities boot straight to the Desk under quiet chrome once the staged-rollout flag flips; existing workspaces keep whatever posture they chose.