the barnacle café

what is this?

Barnacle is a little desktop app. Press ⌃⇧space in any app — even over something fullscreen — and a striped shell with googly eyes surfaces above whatever you're doing. Ask it something; it thinks, then answers in paper thought bubbles that stack up like a comic strip. Press esc or click away and it's gone, the way Spotlight is gone.

There's no browser tab, no dock icon, no window cluttering your ⌘tab switcher. The window itself is invisible — everything you see is a sticker floating on your desktop, and when your cursor isn't over a bubble, clicks fall straight through to whatever's underneath.

Under the shell it speaks to Hermes Agent, Nous Research's agent framework, so it's more than a chat box: it can run tools, look things up, and do real work on your machine — always asking before it touches anything.

on the menu

• the summon ⌃⇧space

  One global shortcut, from anywhere — every Space, every screen. It waits invisibly until called, and dismisses itself the moment you look away.

• models on tap ⌘M

  Hermes, Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok — whatever your Hermes install can pour. tab cycles through the taps mid-conversation; favourites float to the top.

• the full roast asks first

  Real agent work. Tools appear as small chips with their timing while they run, and before any command touches your machine, Barnacle asks — once, always, or never.

• properly typeset no extra charge

  Answers stream in as real markdown — tables, code, and mathematics set with KaTeX rather than ASCII soup.

• room to breathe free refills

  Long answers earn a bigger bubble: the invisible stage quietly grows so the words never feel cramped, then settles back down when the conversation does.

• liquid glass ⌘G

  On macOS 26 the stage can pour itself into real Liquid Glass — with a dial in settings for exactly how frosty you take it.

how it's brewed

A native app, not a wrapped web page: a Rust shell built on Tauri with a React front, so it starts instantly and sips memory while it waits.

Barnacle speaks the same gateway protocol as Hermes' own apps. It runs your local Hermes Agent install as a quiet sidecar, or reaches a hermes web machine elsewhere on your network over WebSocket — your desk, your server, your call.

Settings live in one plain file at ~/.config/barnacle/config.json. No account, no telemetry, nothing in between you and whichever model you're pouring.

counter service

summon · dismiss

⌃⇧space

ask

⏎

next · previous model

tab ⇧tab

model picker

⌘M

settings

⌘,

liquid glass

⌘G

clear the table

⌘K

stop mid-pour

⌘.

vanish

esc