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Assorted things worth knowing about your navi machine.
navi is doas-native: doas apt update works the way you're used to, configured at /etc/doas.conf. It's smaller and simpler than sudo, so it's the default.
But real sudo is installed too, as a compatibility layer — plenty of third-party install scripts (our own scripts/installers included) expect it. Your user has a dedicated rule in /etc/sudoers.d/10-navi-user, so sudo asks for your login password just like doas does, and it works immediately — no logout required.
The bell icon in the panel shows how many notifications are waiting. Click it (or run navi-notifs) to open the viewer in a floating window: browse the list, type a number to trigger that notification's action, d+number to dismiss one, c to clear them all, q to quit.
navi-update pulls the latest navi release and redeploys around your customizations; navi-update --check just reports what's available. The download-arrow icon in the panel checks automatically every 5 minutes and lights up when updates are waiting — click it to update. navi-wired-restore shows how your setup drifted from stock and restores what you choose. And when a release ships new desktop defaults you want wholesale, navi-wired-adopt lays the stock wired configs over yours — with a backup first and a loud warning, because adopt means adopt.
Updates arrive on channels, Debian-style. The stable channel follows tested release tags — a fix only reaches you once it's in a release. The eiri channel is rolling: it tracks the head of the eiri development branch, so you get new work as it lands. Switch channels with navi-update --channel eiri (it asks first, then pins your choice in /etc/navi/channel).
navi is based on Debian, so apt installs anything in the Debian repositories: doas apt install <package>. We also ship flatpak with Flathub enabled, so desktop apps are one install away. And don't forget naviApps — our curated app store, right in your launcher.
For optional third-party extras, run navi-extras (in the launcher, or alacritty -e navi-extras). It's a menu of installers for things like Firefox Nightly, Chrome, Telegram, Element, ani-cli, and the Charm toolkit — nothing runs unless you pick it, and one broken installer can never take down the rest of the menu.
Hey Lain is navi's voice assistant. Tap Alt+V to start listening and tap again to hear her reply. She runs desktop commands directly — moving windows, switching workspaces, opening apps — and chats about anything else through a small language model running locally via ollama. Speech recognition, the voice, and the brain all stay on your machine by default.
If she ever says her brain is offline, run hey-lain --doctor in a terminal: it checks the voice pipeline, the ollama service, the model, and runs a live inference smoke test, with a plain-English hint for each failure. Her brain (model, voice, providers) is configured through the navi-lain-config TUI, in the launcher.
The little robot face in the panel reports what your agents are doing. Dim means quiet; cyan means the backend is ready; green means an agent is working; pink means an agent needs you — a permission, a question, a decision. Hover for the details.
Left-click opens the agent center, middle-click jumps straight into herdr, and right-click opens a quick menu — when an agent is waiting on you, jumping to it leads the list. The face only sees agents running in herdr panes; anything in a bare terminal is invisible to it, for now.
The agent center has six tabs: status (live agents with their little faces - press enter on one to jump to it), models (start/stop the local model service, pull and delete models), harnesses (which agent programs are installed, and which one navi-Q opens), autonomy (how much your agent asks before acting - ask me, balanced, or yolo), evals (race your local models against each other on a set of tasks and see which wins), and providers (your API keys).
Press Super+P to open navishot and pick a screenshot mode: a selected area, a single window, or the entire screen. Screenshots are copied to your clipboard and saved in $HOME/Pictures/Screenshots.
Super+Shift+Z locks your screen. By default the screen locks after 10 minutes of inactivity and the machine suspends after 15 — the little eye icon in the panel (the idle inhibitor) pauses that when you need it. The power icon at the panel's far right handles suspend, hibernate, reboot, and shutdown.
This manual is always one keypress away: Super+Shift+H. It opens in a terminal browser, so it works even when your graphical browser doesn't.
navi is built by xvoidsx, a small collective making computers fun again. It's free software, based on Debian, with a Wayland-only tiling desktop, agents baked in, and a soft spot for old hardware. Welcome to the wired.