Sound, key hints and touch

Turn on the optional sounds, pick up keys from the hints the web app shows, and swipe rows on a touch screen. None of these asks for anything, and none keeps score.

Low tide

When you clear the desk, the web app draws a small shore that settles and goes still, with one line: Low tide. Nobody’s waiting on you. The next promise you made follows it, if one is open.

It shows once per clearing: the first time you see the desk empty after it had work in it, whether you cleared it here, in the TUI or from the CLI. Coming back to a desk that was already clear shows the plain empty state. “Once per clearing” is remembered in this browser only.
Finishing a focus session with everyone answered shows the same scene (“Low tide. That’s everyone.”).
Emptying Reading, Paper trail or the reply queue shows a smaller version.
To make it a still picture, set Settings > Appearance > Motion to Reduced. The default, Match the system, follows your system’s reduced-motion setting.

The TUI has no animation. It says Low tide. Nobody’s waiting on you. in the status bar and on the desk when the desk or the owed-replies list clears, and “Low tide. That’s everyone in the reply queue” when a focus run ends.

Turn sound on

Sound is off until you turn it on. In the web app, open Settings > Sound and switch Sound on; the volume slider is there too. From the command line:

mxr chimes status

enabled=false
volume=0.35
new_mail=bell
sent=sent
archived=archive
trashed=thud
spam=alert
snoozed=pop
unsnoozed=glass
reminder=bell
error=alert

mxr chimes enable
mxr chimes set archived pop     # pick the sound for one event
mxr chimes test archived        # hear it

The web app, TUI and CLI share this one setting, so turning it on in one place turns it on everywhere. The events and sounds are listed in the config reference.

Event	Web app	TUI and CLI (played by the daemon)
Send	`sent`	`sent`
Archive, sweep	`archived`, once per action	`archived`
Snooze	`snoozed`	`snoozed`
Trash, spam, wake a snooze	none	`trashed`, `spam`, `unsnoozed`
Cleared desk	two soft notes rising	none
New mail, reminders, errors	none	`new_mail`, `reminder`, `error`

The web app makes its sounds in the browser, with no audio files: under a quarter of a second, soft, and scaled by the volume. It never plays for moving around or opening a thread, in a background tab, or for the repeats of a held key. When the web app acts, the daemon leaves the sound to the browser, so nothing plays twice. If the browser will not start audio, nothing plays.

Learn keys from hints

Every action with a key shows it in tooltips, menus, the command palette and the keyboard help. If you click the same toolbar or row button three times, a quiet hint names its key once, for example Tip: press e for Archive.

Each action’s hint shows once.
No hint shows while you type, or within ten seconds of pressing a key.
At most one hint every five minutes.
The counts live in this browser.

The full list is in the keybindings reference.

Swipe rows on a touch screen

On a touch screen, swipe rows in any mail list: the desk, the inbox, folders, labels, search results, the queues, and Paper trail. Reading has no swipe.

Swipe	What it does
Short, right	Archive. On the desk: Done. On a Paper trail sender: preview a sweep of that sender.
Long, right	Move to Trash. Not on Waiting on rows.
Left	Snooze, with the time field.

The colour and words under the row show what will happen from about 40 px, and nothing happens until you let go. Trash needs the long throw: a fast flick never trashes. Every swipe can be undone from its toast. The row only moves once your finger is clearly going sideways, so vertical scrolling works as usual. Mouse and trackpad users see none of this.