When the fox comes forward

Before it comes forward

Three marks over a fox nobody is looking at

The bar does what a bar can do first. You open YouTube mid-sitting and a mark appears over the sleeping fox; a minute later a second; at the third it sits up, the marks turn red, and the clock has been holding the whole time.

Each mark is also a text in the fox's chat — …, Still there?, Let's get back to work! — and a dot on the paw says so. That is the honest limit of a menu-bar companion: three punctuation marks and three texts, all of them easy to miss on purpose, because a bar that flashed at you would be the thing you closed. Two minutes into a video nobody is looking at the bar. So the third mark, the one that used to only wake the fox, is now the one that brings it forward.

One mark, two marks

Still in bed, eyes open. The clock holds. Come back and it is forgotten.

Three marks

The fox comes forward — the whole screen, once per drift, never twice in twenty minutes.

What it says

The first word is the fox's, and it is about your day

The chat that opens beside the fox is its real chat — the one on the paw — and this time the fox speaks first. It knows where you went and for how long, how much of the sitting is left, what today has looked like, and what you have told it before.

So the opening is different every time. A fox that has watched you do two good hours says so; a fox that knows the essay has been stuck since Tuesday asks about the essay. It is two or three short texts, never a lecture: it noticed, it wonders why — the work got hard, you're tired, you're bored — and it ends on something you can answer. You can. The composer is right there, and the conversation carries on in the same thread the fox keeps on the bar.

1. Not a scold. The fox is told, in so many words, that it asks and never tells. It may offer to breathe together; it does not tell you what you should have been doing.
2. Not a script. On Pro the lines are the model's, from your day. A free copy's fox says a fixed few — the same warmth, but it cannot know about Tuesday.
3. Not a form. Nothing here has to be answered. Say something, breathe, or just sit with it until the way back opens.

The way back

Three minutes, then Back to focus

Where the button will be, a small chip counts down from 3:00. At zero it becomes Back to focus. Press it and two things happen: the app or tab you drifted to is hidden, and the bar comes back with your sitting exactly where the fox held it.

Three minutes is a rest, not a lock. A "Back to focus" that could be hit on reflex would just be the video's tab closing; the point of the landscape is that you looked at something calm for a moment before you went back. Hidden means hidden, not quit — the video is still there for after the sitting. And the sitting was never lost: the fox stopped the clock the minute you left, so nothing you did on YouTube was counted as focus, and nothing you do next has to make up for it.

• Esc takes the screen down at any time, count or no count. The drift keeps counting on the bar; the fox has said its piece and will not come forward again for this one.
• Once per drift. Come back to work and the marks are cleared outright — the next time away is a new time away — but the fox will not come forward twice inside twenty minutes, whatever the marks say.
• Off, if you'd rather. Settings → the fox → Comes forward at the third mark. The marks and the texts stay; the screen does not.

What leaves your Mac

What the chat has always sent, and nothing more

The landscape is a picture in the app. The fox is a drawing. The only thing that goes anywhere is the chat, and it goes where the fox's chat has always gone: to the model you chose.

On Pro that means your own provider key, or AsX's models if you use those. What the fox sends to open the conversation is the same handful of facts it would use to answer you on the bar — the name of the place you drifted to, how many minutes, how many are left on the sitting, today's totals, and the few lines from earlier talks that bear on this one. Not the page you were on, not a screenshot, not the title of the video. A free copy's fox sends nothing at all: its lines are in the app.

How the fox decides you have drifted in the first place — a lecture from a rabbit hole, a search for work from a search for the score — is the first article. The full picture is on the privacy page.