Desktop Tray

The consumer desktop distribution for Signet is the Electron app in surfaces/desktop. It owns the native window, menu bar tray, bundled Bun runtime, and daemon process lifecycle for desktop installs.

surfaces/tray is intentionally small. It contains shared tray/menu state utilities only. It is not a desktop shell and contains no legacy native-shell code.

Runtime model

On startup, the Electron app probes the configured daemon port (SIGNET_PORT, default 3850). If a daemon is already running, the app attaches to it. If not, it starts the bundled Bun daemon from the packaged resources and marks that daemon as desktop-owned.

The daemon remains a separate local process. The desktop app is a distribution and control layer, not a replacement for the daemon.

When signet update install or daemon auto-update installs a new Signet version, the update system checks for a managed Linux desktop install at ~/.local/bin/signet-desktop / ~/.local/share/signet/desktop/Signet.AppImage. If present, it refreshes the Electron AppImage from the synced Signet source checkout as part of the same update. Unmanaged desktop launchers are left untouched and reported as skipped.

User-facing behavior

The Electron desktop app provides:

• native tray/menu bar status
• daemon start, stop, and restart actions
• hide-to-tray behavior when the main window closes
• dashboard launch/focus
• quick memory capture
• memory search
• bundled daemon fallback for consumer installs
• desktop update checks from the tray menu and on startup for packaged builds

When a packaged update is available, Signet prompts to download it and then restart into the new build. The dashboard is bundled into the desktop app, so desktop updates are how desktop users receive new dashboard pages such as Sources.

The dashboard is still the same web dashboard served by the daemon. Browser usage and desktop usage share the dashboard codepath.

Development

bun run build:desktop

For focused desktop work:

cd surfaces/desktop
bun run build:desktop
bun run dev

The desktop build stages:

1. the shared tray utilities
2. the Bun daemon and dashboard bundle
3. a platform Bun runtime
4. Electron packaging artifacts

Generated desktop resources live under surfaces/desktop/resources/ and are not committed.

Release artifacts

The desktop workflow builds Electron artifacts for:

AUR metadata is generated from the release AppImage URL and checksum by deploy/aur/generate-pkgbuild.sh.