鱼昼夜常醒
百丈清规
A small wooden fish for your Mac’s desktop.
Click it and it goes tok, nothing more. Knocking earns no merit.
Why a fish
The fish is awake day and night, so wood is carved in its shape and struck, to rouse the drowsy and the slack.
The wooden fish, muyu, is a hollow temple block that monks strike to keep time while chanting. Plinth puts one on a small pedestal beside your windows.
Many wooden-fish apps float “merit +1” over every knock and keep a running score. Plinth keeps none. When Emperor Wu listed the temples he had built and asked Bodhidharma how much merit he had earned, the answer was 并无功德, none at all. Your first knock gets the same answer.
鱼昼夜常醒，刻木象形击之，所以警昏惰也。
敕修百丈清规
What it does, and no more
-
Knock it
No two knocks alike. A firmer press lands harder, a knock off the top sounds more of the shell, and a run of knocks rings on together, in a room you choose, from a meditation room to a great hall.
-
Auto-knock
Every 0.4 to 4 seconds: steady, quickening (起板), or natural. It can stop at 108, one turn of a mala.
-
A stick of incense
25, 45, or 60 minutes. One knock to light it, three when it goes out, silence between. No clock, no count.
-
Knock as you type
Each key, in any app, knocks once. Plinth never learns which key, so it needs no permission to listen.
-
Quiet in a call
While another app is using the microphone, only a knock by hand makes a sound.
-
Out of the way
No Dock icon. Above your windows or down on the desktop, wherever you put it. It updates itself, and asks first.
-
Knock from anywhere
open -g plinth://knockknocks once, so the fish can tell you a build is done. Shortcuts gets a Knock action too.
Twenty-one skins
Each with its own mallet and its own knock. Knock them. The abacus keeps no count, and the mug splashes without spilling.
Make your own from a single image or a folder of frames (the skin format), or find more in the community gallery.
Put one on your desk
- Needs
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.
- Trust
- Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.
- Updates
- Checks once a day and asks before installing. You can turn it off.
- Source
- Free and open. Code under MIT, art under CC0, on GitHub, with release notes.
放下着
赵州
Put it down.