What sigilOS looks like
A NeXTSTEP-grade dark desktop, capability-secure underneath.
These are faithful renderings of the surfaces the fleet has been bringing up on real hardware — the login screen, the Lumen desktop, the dock and the Doom Pile, the themes, and the Ex Machina boot readout.
Rendered from the shipped module specs and the on-metal screendumps (which are bring-up diagnostics, not final art). The visual language — Lumen-dark by default, #a78bfa accent, LCARS as an alternate theme — is what these surfaces actually render in.
The flagship Lumen design language, specified by grioghar — a coherent system of five ideas the render lanes build to exactly. These mockups are the target, not a screendump.
① The diamond cursor
Not an arrow — an elongated faceted diamond (taller than wide, a stretched rectangle, not a square). A bisecting line splits it; each quadrant is shaded for a gem-cut, lit-from-one-side read (upper-right darker than upper-left; bottom mirrors top). It tilts 20° by handedness — 20° left for right-handed, 20° right for left-handed — and, like every movable Lumen element, it casts a shadow. Hotspot is the top vertex.
② Bordered file-type icons
Every icon sits inside a frame — a few-pixel raised border — and the whole tile rises a few pixels off the desktop, a thin widget resting on the surface (not flat, not a cube). That lift is what casts its shadow. The art inside is the app's embedded icon, or a file-type icon when there isn't one (FS maps the type → identifier). The frame is the surface; the art is what presses.
③ Button-press physicality
A click has weight. The cursor tips down like a stylus touching the surface, and under it the art presses straight in — it recedes into the frame (not down), shrinking back as the rim shadows it on every side. The frame's edge pixels stay put; the art sinks into the surface. (And if the app it opens stays open, the icon stays in — see the demo below.)
Try it — open an app, the icon stays in
Click a tile to open it; click again to close. A raised tile floats on the desktop (drop shadow). The moment its app, file, or Smart Window opens, the icon presses in and stays in — a persistent depressed state, not a click flash — sunk into the surface with the rim shadowing it all around, and a live dot to mark it open. Close it and the tile pops back out.
④ One lighting model
One light source casts every shadow — icons, windows, and the cursor alike. It has two dimensions. Direction comes from the sun's azimuth (time of day): morning left, noon down, pre-sundown right. Length comes from the sun's elevation (season + latitude, from the device's location): long in winter when the sun rides low, short in summer when it's high overhead. At night the sun sets and a user-placed virtual light takes over — its position sets both the direction and the length.
Try it — the lighting, live
The same model, interactive. Each shadow stays attached to its object and stretches out the side away from the light — drag Time of day and it runs down the left or right edge; drag Season (the sun's height) and it grows longer as the light lowers/recedes and shrinks as it rises. Flip Day / Night to hand the scene to the virtual light. The window, the icon tile, and the diamond cursor all cast under the one light.
⑤ Hover highlights
Hover gives quiet feedback. A window under the pointer lifts with a very-light highlight; in the app launcher, a soft band slides behind the icon you're pointing at. Subtle enough to never shout, present enough to always answer.
The login screen
Rendered on @grio's real x86-64 metal at VER=12 — titlebar, "sign in to continue", an admin and a standard user card with avatars, password field, and Sign-in button. Crisp, correct colors, stable. The same one-light model reaches the login screen: the card, the user tiles, and the Sign-in button all lift off the backdrop and cast shadows under it — one consistent lighting world across login and desktop.
The Lumen desktop
The NeXTSTEP-inspired workspace: a top menu bar, a column browser navigating the tag hierarchy (no physical folders — each column narrows the query), a Smart Folder shelf, a tag well, and the dock with running indicators. Everything wired to live filesystem tag-queries through the EL0 seam.
The Doom Pile
Hover the dock's ⌖ button for three seconds and every window sprawls into a dense, touching stack — shambled papers on a desk. A cmd-tab locator spins a gold glow around the selected window and draws its show-through outline so you can find it in the pile.
Two themes — NeXT-dark & LCARS
Lumen keeps its own palette and widget style; LCARS is a swappable alternate color theme. The NeXT behavior (vertical menus, column browser, tear-off) is identical across every theme — only the colors and metrics change.
The Ex Machina boot readout
The boot animation doubles as a BIOS-style hardware readout: each detected component lights a node on a capability-topology lattice, and every boot stage writes a structured, AI-analyzable entry. Green = detected, slate = absent. Born out of the metal bring-up — the screen is the universal debug surface.
The surfaces above are the desktop you see; these are the systems underneath it. Each diagram is the canonical picture for a Core capability, and links back to it.
Real TLS 1.3 — the handshake
A full TLS 1.3 handshake in Sigil, then encrypted application data — over a brokered network capability, so the app never holds a raw socket.
Content-addressed dedup — the CAS filesystem
Identical data is stored once and referenced by hash. Snapshots are copy-on-write forks; replication is a CAS diff that no-ops on objects the receiver already has.
SigDB — query plan, not re-parsed text
The cc0 compiler owns the SQL parser and emits a typed query plan; SigDB's executor runs it directly. Strict types, MVCC, auto-maintained B-tree indexes, native AEAD.
The font subsystem — outline to pixels
All-Sigil TrueType/OpenType: composite glyphs, full-Unicode cmap format 12, and a bounded nonzero-winding rasterizer — the stack that put anti-aliased text on the x86 login screen on real metal.
Scale with hardware — one image, four tiers
One codebase, AArch64 + x86-64. The unified Pi image detects the SoC at boot and scales up from the Pi-3B floor; the floor always works, everything above it is additive.
These surfaces are real and shipping — see the features, the blog for the daily build log, and the build journal for how they got onto real metal.