Your first hour

Takumi is built so that one hour is enough to feel at home. This page follows that hour in the order things usually come up, with the keys you know from a Mac or a Windows PC beside Takumi’s. Nothing here needs a terminal.

Super is the key with the Windows logo on a PC keyboard, or Command on a Mac keyboard. Most of what follows starts with it.

What is on the screen

Two things. The Sky, a painted picture behind everything that follows the time of day, and the Core, a small capsule at the bottom centre of the screen. At rest the Core shows the app you are in, the date and time, and small marks for the network, the battery and the sound. Everything else grows out of it: search, settings, the calendar and messages from your apps. There is no menu bar, dock or taskbar. The Core and the Palette explains every part.

Get online

Click the marks at the right end of the capsule, or press Super+I. That is Quick settings. Point at the Wi-Fi tile and click the arrow at its end (or right-click the tile) to list the networks around you. Pick yours, press Enter and type its password right there in the Core. A wrong password is known in about ten seconds: the field shakes, turns red and empties, ready for another try.

A hotel, café or airport network that wants you to sign in on a web page opens that page by itself. Later, Enter on the network you are on shows a code a visitor’s phone camera can scan to join, with the password hidden until you press Enter again.

The arrow on the Bluetooth tile finds your headphones and pairs them. When a device shows a code, the Core shows it too (“Does your phone show 482913?”) so you can check they match, as on a phone.

Tested in a virtual machine. Wi-Fi has been tested on simulated networks, and Bluetooth against a stand-in for a real adapter. A real laptop’s Wi-Fi card and Bluetooth have not been tried yet, nor work or school Wi-Fi that needs a username.

More in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Find anything

Super+Space grows the capsule into the Palette, Takumi’s search. Type part of a name and press Enter:

• an app: fire finds Firefox
• an open window, by its title or its app
• a setting: bluetooth, night light, bigger
• a sum: 12*7 shows the answer, and Enter copies it
• a sentence, such as turn off bluetooth and dim the screen, which goes to the assistant

When you do not know the word, open the empty Palette and press Enter on Settings. It lists the topics: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Sound, Displays, Keyboard & mouse, Power & battery, Look, Apps, Privacy & security and Backups. Enter on one shows everything about it. Help, beside it, opens this guide in the browser.

For your first week, the empty Palette also shows a few Start here rows: Connect to Wi-Fi (while you are offline), Pick a look, Keys you already know, Get your apps and Set up the assistant. Each leaves once you have used it.

Esc clears what you typed, and a second Esc closes the Palette.

Get your apps

Type the app’s name in the Palette. When you do not have it yet, a row says Get Spotify (or Zoom, Slack, Steam and many more). Enter installs it from Flathub, the shared app store for Linux, for your account only and without a password.

Some services work best as a website in a window of its own. Get Outlook, Get Word, Get WhatsApp, Get Gmail and others make a web app like that, with its own icon, in a second or two.

The empty Palette also has a row of app tiles above the search field: the apps you open most, then All apps. Type apps to see every app as a grid of icons.

More in Apps, the Shelf and defaults.

The keys your hands know

Super is Command. Super+C, V, X, Z, A, S, F, W, T and N mean the same thing in every app, the terminal included, where Super+C copies instead of stopping what is running. If you came from Windows, Ctrl still works in most apps; Super works in all of them.

On a PC keyboard, the key beside the space bar is Alt, not the Windows key. If you would rather have Command there, as on a Mac, type swap alt in the Palette and choose Swap Alt and Super. Type keys in the Palette any time to see the keys worth knowing, or press Super+Shift+/ for a list of the main keys on screen. Keys has all of them.

Windows sit side by side

Windows open next to each other on an endless strip and never cover one another. A new window opens to the right of the one you are in, and opening one never shrinks the one you were reading: you slide along the strip instead. The capsule shows the strip as small blocks, one per column, so you can see where you are.

Hold Super and press Tab again to choose among recent windows. Windows on the strip explains stacking, floating windows and two screens.

Screenshots and recording

The keys are the Mac’s. The picture is saved in Pictures/Screenshots, copied so you can paste it straight away, and shown small in the capsule, where a press opens it.

More in Screenshots and recording.

Make it yours

Press Super+Space, type theme, and move up and down the list: each of the fifty-five themes shows itself on the whole desktop while it is selected. Enter keeps one; Esc puts yours back. Most themes are dark, some are light (type light theme to see those). A theme follows the time of day by itself, warmer at dawn and dimmer at night, and the Sky moves with it.

More in Themes and the Sky and Quick settings, Today and notices.

When something is wrong

Press Super+Space and type something is wrong, then Enter on Check this computer. Takumi checks the internet, sound, free space, updates, its services, the clock and the battery. It fixes what is safe to fix (Wi-Fi left off, a sound service that stopped) and says what it did in one sentence, such as “All fine” or “2 need you”, with the first of them.

When one thing stops working, fix or restart lists rows that restart only that: Restart Wi-Fi, Restart Bluetooth, Restart sound and Restart the desktop, which keeps your apps open. More in When something is wrong.

Updates, and the undo button

Takumi never updates or restarts the computer while you work. Press Super+Space, type update and choose Update Takumi when it suits you. Takumi asks once, prepares the new system in a “room” beside yours and says when a restart will use it. The system you are using is not touched until then.

If the new system does not start properly, the computer comes back to the previous one by itself. If it starts but you do not like it, Go back to the previous system in the Palette undoes the update.

Shut down, Restart and Log out ask for a second Enter (or a second press) before they close your apps. More in Updates, rooms and rollback.

What feels different for a week

• Windows do not float or overlap. They sit side by side, and you move along them.
• There is no menu bar, dock or taskbar. The capsule shows where you are and what is on.
• An app comes from a row in the Palette, not a downloaded installer.
• Settings are found by typing what you want, not in a window of panels.

What feels better on day one: nothing phones home, nothing restarts your computer while you work, and the fans stay quiet.

From the command line

Everything on this page is a Palette row, but if you like a terminal (Super+Return), these do the same:

takumi doctor              # check this computer and fix what is safe
takumi update              # prepare an update; yours is untouched until you restart
takumi rollback            # start the system from before your latest update
takumi room list           # every system you can go back to
takumi theme set ember     # switch theme by name
takumi phase set night     # keep the night colours; "auto" follows the clock again
takumi lock                # lock the screen

takumi on its own lists every group of commands. More in The takumi command.