Summary

Adopts glisse (Liquid Glass for the web) in the desktop renderer, scoped to the places where glass actually reads as glass.

Maintainer polish (after pass 4)

• cb0778c: refined Liquid Glass surfaces, accessibility and UI polish.
• 396b9e4: aligned the macOS toolbar capsules, vibrancy glass and composer buttons.
• 2f0d0b4: enforced unused-dependency checks with Knip in CI, and dropped unused deps.
  • The removed deps are seven [@univerjs](/univerjs) sheet presets, mobile clsx/ws and harness bun-types.
  • Nothing imported them.
• b42e409: refined interaction recovery and accessibility, with new tests.
• Follow-ups on top:
  • eb71315 refreshes the three reduced-motion chat baselines, which the vibrancy change shifted.
  • 522c5a0 fixes a double …/…/ in compacted search paths, with a regression test.

Design pass 4: Spotlight, sheets, banners, sidebar

Command palette as Spotlight. It is anchored in the upper third, so it grows downward as results change instead of re-centering and jumping. It also gets a large search field, an accent-filled selected row, and a faint scrim instead of a heavy grey one.

Light	Dark

Notification banners. Toasts become macOS-style banners: rounded and lifted, with severity in a red icon tile and a neutral bold title.

Light	Dark

Sheets. Dialogs drop the heavy dark outline for a hairline edge and a deep, soft shadow.

Light

Sidebar symbols take the accent, like Finder and Mail. The context panel's section labels also drop the wide-tracked uppercase.

Light	Dark

_{Pass 4 images live in commit 6fdd3e0 and leave the tree in the next commit.}

Design pass 3: Apple craft details

These go beyond glass. Each image shows the PR's earlier head on the left and pass 3 on the right.

Settings sidebar: System Settings–style icon tiles. White glyphs on Apple system colors. Group labels lose the shouty uppercase.

Light	Dark

Working glow. While the agent runs, a slow conic light circles the composer rim, in the spirit of Apple Intelligence. The colors are spun from the accent hue. It sits outside the opaque surface, so text contrast is untouched.

Light	Dark

macOS menus and capsule buttons. Menus get rounder proportions, a soft ambient shadow, and an accent-filled highlight row. Push buttons become capsules as in macOS 26, and every rounded rectangle draws as a continuous superellipse.

Menu

Also in pass 3

• Scrollbars: overlay-style; the thumb appears while hovering the scroll area, and stays visible in Increase Contrast.
• Top bar: the subtitle is upright instead of italic.
• Onboarding: the step count no longer sits under the close button, which is now a circle.
• Accessibility fallbacks: Increase Contrast turns tiles into outlines, and forced colors shows the bare system-colored glyph on the Highlight row. For the glow, Increase Contrast swaps in a solid Highlight rim, forced colors hides it, and Reduce Motion stops it.

_{Pass 3 images live in commit bf653b7 and leave the tree in the next commit.}

Screenshots (passes 1–2)

Real Electron renders from the quality-gate harness (Linux, 1240×820): main on the left, this PR on the right.

Zoomed details

Light	Dark

Chat: toolbar capsules on both sides, the glass "3 new updates" pill over the scrolled feed, and the glass send button.

New-chat landing: glass starter capsules and the sidebar capsule.

Settings → Experiments: Liquid Glass switches on the app accent, and the glass Back capsule.

Settings → Tool Access: segmented control and glass search capsule.

_{The images live in commit a94b61d and are removed from the tree again in 5cbffd9, so nothing extra lands on main.}

What changed

Foundation

• Moved glisse out of the root harness dependencies and into apps/desktop, pinned to 0.4.3.
• components/ui wrappers, so feature code never imports glisse directly:
  • GlassGroup and GlassButton.
  • SearchField: defaults to w-full, like the shadcn Input it replaces.
  • SegmentedControl: assigns tab ids and aria-controls for its tab panel.
  • Switch: the shared switch is now glisse-backed and keeps the shadcn contract: checked/defaultChecked/onCheckedChange, size, and the data-slot/data-state hooks.
• styles/glass.css maps glisse onto the app's tokens at desktop density and handles Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast and forced colors. Colour tokens live in tokens/base.css, where token-compliance wants colour formulas.
• agent_docs/desktop-ui.md documents the glass layer as an explicit exception to "no custom component libraries", plus the gotchas below. It also covers the pass 3 and pass 4 conventions:
  • superellipse corners and capsule buttons;
  • settings tile tints, menus and the working glow;
  • overlay scrollbars and the Spotlight palette;
  • sheets, notification banners and accent sidebar symbols.

Surfaces

• Top bar: the thread toolbar (right) and the sidebar toggle / New Chat (left) each sit in a glass capsule, macOS Tahoe style. This works on every platform placement.
• Chat: the jump-to-latest pill is a glass button over the scrolling feed.
• Composer: filled glass send button (olive accent) and a glass Stop control. The composer body stays opaque, with a glass rim and lift.
• New-chat landing: the starter prompts are glass capsules with the glisse press spring.
• Switches: every switch in Settings gets the Liquid Glass look on the app accent, via the one shared Switch.
• Settings: the Back control is a glass navigation capsule, and the Tool Access tabs become a segmented control linked to an explicit role="tabpanel".
• Searches: Tool Access, Archived Chats, OpenAI connectors and Manage Models become glass search capsules.

Deliberately not done

• Composer translucency. The Electron quality gate requires opaque text backgrounds so it can prove contrast, so the composer stays opaque.
• Popovers and dropdowns. These stay opaque, per the existing "selector popovers use an opaque surface" contract. glisse Menu also lacks a portal, collision handling and typeahead.
• Large or resizing surfaces. glisse rebuilds a per-pixel SVG refraction lens on every resize, so it stays on small fixed-size chrome.
• Single-line file rows. A Finder-style single line would hide the size and date behind a hover at the context panel's width, so the two-line rows stay.

Gotchas encoded in the wrappers and CSS

• glisse's CSS is unlayered, so Tailwind utilities can't override its properties. Overrides go in glass.css; the search field uses revert-layer to hand width back to utilities.
• glisse press springs write inline scale/translate, so positioned glass buttons use a wrapper for centring.
• Inline mention chips opt out of superellipse corners, so the composer overlay still matches its textarea mirror pixel for pixel.
• Forced colors also turns on Increase Contrast here, so the forced-colors tile rule explicitly outranks the Increase Contrast outline. Hairline superellipse outlines anti-alias inconsistently inside the sliding settings overlay.

Verification

• Static checks: bun run typecheck:desktop, bun run knip and bunx biome check . pass.
• Desktop tests: all 258 desktop test files pass, each run in isolation as CI runs them.
  • Design-contract tests that asserted the old classes are updated.
  • The high-contrast and forced-colors switch rules now target glisse's thumb.
  • The jsdom harness exposes HTMLAnchorElement, which glisse's segmented control needs.
  • A regression test covers the Tool Access tab/panel ARIA linkage.
• Electron quality gate: clipping, keyboard, contrast and Axe checks pass in every mode. Baselines for passes 3 and 4 were regenerated by running the full gate in CI's pinned Playwright image (mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1.62.0-noble). That container reproduces CI's renders, and the full gate passes there with 76 passed, 0 failed and 4 skipped. docs/assets/desktop-product.png is synced.
• CI on d681a9e: all 13 checks pass on Bun 1.4.4.

CI fixes (failures inherited from main 82c4f3b)

• Sandbox, a real bug: tmpScratchRoots canonicalized blocked roots and then filtered the result against the original spellings. A project root reached through a symlink came back as writable scratch in no-project-write (read-only) policies. Both spellings are now blocked. This fixes Tests, Linux native sandbox x64/arm64 and macOS ARM64 smoke.
• Lint: formatted ContextSidebar.tsx and ActivityGroupCard.tsx. The SidebarSearchOverlay query re-trigger is intentional, so it now has a documented biome-ignore, following the repo convention.
• Windows arm64 smoke: the Codex cross-process install test shared a 2s phase budget that cold Windows ARM runners exceeded. The budgets are still shared per phase, now 10s, with a matching test timeout.
• Bun pinned to the 1.4.4 release (d681a9e): daily canary builds 675ee5b97 and 9365e0c1a break the unit suite on main.
  • Expo Router's Link fails a default-export interop check, and journal and window-mode tests fail too.
  • Manual main runs 41688828221 and 41785796391 show it.
  • The same files pass on 1.4.4. .bun-version is now 1.4.4, the CI contract test requires an exact release, and agent_docs/repo-contracts.md documents the pin.
  • Release workflows read .bun-version too, so they now build on 1.4.4 as well.
• Electron gate: the 3 Canvas text and 3 first-paint baselines were stale on main. They were regenerated in CI's exact Playwright image and verified pixel-identical to CI's own failure renders.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

claude.ai/code/session_01Xh9rMb5z6HnGxac2co5X3R

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[!NOTE] Medium Risk Very broad desktop UI and styling changes (new glisse dependency, composer/top-bar/settings surfaces) with scattered interaction tweaks; no auth or server logic, but high visual/regression surface for Electron quality gates and a11y modes.

Overview This PR re-skins the desktop renderer around glisse Liquid Glass, with new @/components/ui wrappers (GlassGroup, GlassButton, SearchField, SegmentedControl, glisse-backed Switch) and a large styles/glass.css + token bridge so overrides beat glisse’s unlayered CSS and accessibility modes (Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, forced colors) stay sane.

Where glass lands: top-bar toolbar capsules, jump-to-latest, composer send/stop (composer body stays opaque with rim + data-agent-working conic glow), new-chat starter chips, settings Back, and glass search fields across settings. Tool Access and Subagents drop Radix tab chrome for SegmentedControl with explicit tab/panel ARIA.

Non-glass Apple craft: capsule push buttons, superellipse corners, macOS menu/select highlighting, Spotlight-style command palette placement/scrim, sheet shadows, notification banners with icon tiles, accent sidebar nav icons, overlay scrollbars, and System Settings–style colored nav tiles (settingsPages tints).

Tooling / deps: .bun-version pins 1.4.4 (not canary); CI runs knip --include dependencies,devDependencies; seven unused [@univerjs](/univerjs) sheet presets are removed from apps/desktop.

Smaller behavior fixes: readiness errors parsed for display (formatReadinessError), file explorer “Open” always uses openFile, new-chat composer no longer locks on attachment ingest (status text instead), activity timeline keyboard scroll ownership, adaptive rail width when not overlay, and thread-details toggle aria labels.

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit 3d735878bc626929cddb982f9621105982576c32. Bugbot is set up for automated code reviews on this repo. Configure here.}