no noise, just a trill

a quiet, scriptable notification compositor for macOS — small silent cards, drawn by a daemon you own, from anything that can run a command

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Your build finishes in a window you can't see. Your agent stops, blocked on a yes it has no way to ask for. Slack pings you five times about one thread. macOS has the same answer for all three: the same banner, with a chime.

trill is the other answer. A cat doesn't meow at everything — a trill is the small chirred note it makes in passing, enough to register that something happened, not enough to stop anyone's afternoon. So: flat, silent cards, one visual language for every tool on the Mac, and a command line that puts one on screen in six words.

It isn't a Notification Center replacement — Apple doesn't sell that entitlement. It's the honest version: a pipeline trill owns end to end, fed by sources you turn on one at a time.

trill send --title "Deploy landed" --body "preview promoted to production" \
           --source deploy --kind done

# the two-way one: blocks until a pill is pressed, exits with its index
trill ask "Push to origin?" --pill Allow --pill Deny --timeout 300 && git push

# one card for a whole build, not fifty banners
trill send --key haus --progress 42% --title "haus rebuild" --body "12 of 30"

trill ping     # is the daemon up?
trill report   # something's wrong — file it, with this Mac's details filled in

Grab the latest release, drag Trill.app to /Applications, launch it once. macOS 14+, Developer-ID signed and notarized, no Dock icon, no account. On haus it's haus.notifications.compositor = true;. → installing trill

what it does

• anything can draw one — a line of shell, or a JSON line down the socket. No SDK, no key. --kind colors the card by what it asks of you (ask · fault · chat · pulse · done · note); --urgency is the separate axis of loudness, so a fault can be low and a note critical.
• a question waits, and can answer itself — an ask nobody catches parks as a slim fin on the screen edge instead of vanishing, and stays there across restarts. It leaves when you answer it, when something else says it's answered (trill resolve, or a merged PR), or when a check you declared in your rules file finally says yes. Exit code = the pill pressed, 75 = nobody answered, which is never consent.
• a long build gets one card, then the edge — --key plus --progress is one bar that fills instead of fifty banners. When its seconds on screen are up it parks beside the questions and keeps filling, so a twenty-minute rebuild is still glanceable at minute twelve. The ending takes it down and gets a card of its own.
• a burst stays one card — cards deal downward from the top-right and overlap; everything on one --thread folds into a single card with a count. Hover to hold it, hover to open it into the list of what folded in, each line a button for its own event.
• it reads the room — quiet hours, and the Focus you already turned on: chatter goes to the inbox, faults still land, and a question parks on the ledge rather than being swallowed while somebody waits on the answer. trill reads the Focus and never writes it; the dial stays Apple's.
• shy on a shared screen — while macOS is showing its in-use indicator (screen capture, camera or mic) or a display is mirrored, every card drops its body and keeps only the title, exactly as if it had been sent --redact. Nothing to arm before a call.
• the morning paper — unlock a Mac that was busy without you and one low card says what it missed: while you were away — 2 asks, 1 fault, 14 notes, and clicks through to exactly those. Not a replay: a quiet night draws nothing, and it can only ever fire as you sit back down.
• your next meeting, ten minutes out — turn the Calendar source on and each meeting gets one quiet card: the title, in 10m, and a Join pill when the invite carries a link trill recognizes (the first https:// in someone's notes is as often a doc, and a pill that opens one is a lie in a button). EventKit pushes, so a meeting moved on your phone moves the card. trill reads your calendar and holds no access to write to it.
• the overflow has somewhere to go — digest cards, evicted fins, anything quiet hours held back: it's all in the inbox, live and searchable. Unread means trill never actually put it in front of you — including the banners it drew at a locked screen.
• other apps, if you want them — System Mirror redraws other apps' banners in trill's language, off by default and quarantined behind a schema probe, and trill doctor names the ones macOS is now drawing twice.
• silent, by construction — there is no audio call anywhere in this binary, not even for critical. Flat surfaces, a few points of motion, none of it under Reduce Motion. Nothing ever steals focus.
• native and small — one Swift LSUIElement binary that is both the daemon and the CLI. No Electron, no telemetry, no cloud, no login.

Everything trill decides comes out of two hot-reloaded JSON files in ~/.config/trill/, and Settings is a view onto them: anything you can click you can type. → rules and settings

more

• Install — the release, Nix, haus, and what puts trill on your PATH
• Rules & settings — rules.json, config.json, resolvers, displays
• Other apps — System Mirror, trill doctor, and the silence walkthrough
• ai/SKILL.md — the agent surface: drop it in and "tell me when this finishes" works first try
• Architecture — the invariants, and the measurements they stand on
• AGENTS.md — building it, testing it, shipping it
• trill help — every verb, every flag

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_{pre-release · every path that could lose your work is either reversible by design or stops to ask you first — that's the intent, not a warranty. run it on a machine you can afford to rebuild, and tell us what breaks.}

_{MIT · one of the hausfold repos — haus rebuilds the Mac, this is how it tells you something happened}

⌂ hausfold