The keyboard-lock tool taught us something: the tools people get excited about aren't always about ports.
They're about the desk. The physical, crumb-covered, three-monitor desk where the ports happen. So the Tools panel now has a section for exactly that — Desk & Character — and a few new residents scattered where they belong. 95 tools now, and these are the ones with a pulse:
- Rubber duck. The oldest debugging protocol in the world, finally in the menu bar. Explain your bug to the duck; the duck asks the questions you already know work — "when did it last work?", "what are you assuming that you haven't checked?", "you skipped a step just now." It runs no commands and sends nothing anywhere. It is right disturbingly often.
- Pick a colour. The system magnifier loupe, one click away: click any pixel on any screen and its hex value is on your clipboard. No screenshot round-trip, and — rare for this app's permission-honest world — no permission dialog at all; macOS provides this one for free.
- Type clipboard. For everywhere paste is forbidden: VNC consoles, remote desktops, license-key fields, "please type your password" boxes. Three-second countdown to focus the target field, then the clipboard is typed as real keystrokes. Same Accessibility permission as the keyboard lock — one grant covers both.
- Free-port roulette. Spin for a random unused port between 10000 and 30000; the winner is checked against reality and copied. Settles the "which port should this run on" debate the way all good debates end: with dice.
- Is it DNS? Queries example.com through your system resolver, Cloudflare, and Google, then prints the verdict. You already know the verdict. Now you have the receipt.
- Plus lorem ipsum and a starter .gitignore straight to the clipboard, because every new repo begins the same two ways.
The rule that keeps this honest
Character in a utility app is a debt you take on: every cute thing that doesn't work becomes evidence the serious things might not either. So the Desk drawer follows the same rules as the port tools, without exception. Nothing needs sudo. The one tool that needs a real permission (Type clipboard) shares the single Accessibility grant with the keyboard lock and explains itself in place. Type clipboard is capped at 5,000 characters so a stray 3-megabyte log can't be "typed" into a chat window. And the duck — the duck runs nothing. We checked. Twice.
The test for every one of these was the same test as the other 88: would a developer actually reach for it? A colour loupe, a paste-where-you-can't, and a duck all pass. The excuse generator did not make the cut.
Why character matters in an instrument
We spent this whole release building a design system whose motto is "colour is signal, never decoration" — the most po-faced sentence a UI has ever committed to. The Desk drawer is not a contradiction of that; it's the reward for it. When the instrument is disciplined everywhere it counts, you've earned a duck. An app that's all discipline is a spreadsheet; an app that's all duck is a toy. The trick is knowing which rows are which.
Tools → Desk & Character. Say hi to the duck.
95 tools. One of them quacks.
$5. One Mac. Yours to keep. No tracking, no telemetry, no account. Or run the free CLI — le is open source.