A lucky charm for your Linux desktop
Root-level good luck for your desktop.
The one up there is real. Give it a pull.
Seven to choose from
A charm on a cord, hanging from the top of your screen. It sways on its own. Pull it and it swings. Tap it and it does its little thing.
That is the whole app. It does nothing useful, and it is not going to start.
Free, and staying that way · Linux with GNOME 45–48
Pick your luck
Tap one and it goes up on the cord. The page takes its colour from whatever is hanging.
Nazar boncuğu
Turkey
Stares down whatever is staring at you.*
Tap it and · it spins
* Effects unverified, unmeasured, and frankly unmeasurable. The swinging, though, is real.
You also get to pick what it hangs by — a fine thread, a round leather cord, twisted rope, or wooden beads — along with how big it is, how long the cord runs, and how much of a breeze it gets. None of it matters. All of it is adjustable.
The daruma keeps score
Tap it once to make a wish and it paints its left eye. Tap it again when the wish lands and it paints the right.
It remembers between reboots. So there is now a small wooden doll on your screen, patiently waiting to find out whether you meant it.
It knows when to leave
Start a screen share, a recording or a remote session and it takes itself down — charm, cord and hook — then hangs itself back up the moment you stop. Delightful on your own desktop; less so behind your head in a stand-up.
The rest of the time it hangs over your windows without taking your clicks. You can work straight through it — the only thing on screen that notices your mouse is the charm itself.
Getting one
One line. It fetches the latest release, installs it and switches it on.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rahulpatwa1303/SudoCharm/master/get.sh | bash
Then log out and back in. GNOME will not pick up a new extension any other way. It catches everyone once, including me.
Would rather not pipe a script into your shell?
Fair. Read it
first, or grab the zip from
releases and run
gnome-extensions install --force on it yourself — there is nothing to
unzip.
Linux only. There is no Mac or Windows version and there is not going to be — if you are on a Mac, the next paragraph is for you.
Where this came from
I saw Lucky Dangle, a lovely little Mac app that hangs a charm from your menu bar, and wanted one on Linux. This is my own build for GNOME — my code, my artwork, their idea. If you have a Mac, go and buy theirs.
Two questions people keep asking:
Is it really a pendulum, or just an animation?
Really a pendulum. The swing, the stretch in the cord and the charm's own lag behind the cord are worked out fresh every frame, which is why a flick makes it whip and why pulling it further down makes it swing slower.
θ'' = −(g/L)·sin θ − damping·θ' + breeze(t) stretch'' = −k·stretch − c·stretch' + ω²·L·0.06 lag'' = −k₂·(lag − θ) − c₂·lag'
The idle sway is three slow waves of 6.7, 10.9 and 17.3 seconds. Those never line up, so it never repeats itself and never starts to look like a GIF. The charm on this page runs the same numbers as the one on your desktop.
Can I make my test suite ask for luck?
You can. It listens on the session bus, so anything that can run a command can give it a nudge.
# .git/hooks/post-commitsudocharm bless "$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"# or make it earn its keeppytest && sudocharm bless || sudocharm flick 9