The family

nebelhaus is not one repo — it’s a small family, each piece owning one job and usable on its own. The rice (nebelhaus) ties them together, but pounce, trill, perch, and nebelung stand alone too.

The repos

Repo	Owns	You touch it when…
🏠 nebelhaus	the rice — nix-darwin modules for tiling, bar, shell, security, palette wiring	anything about how the system behaves
🐾 pounce	the launcher — a native Swift command palette + its generic command scripts	the palette app or a built-in command changes
🐦 trill	the messages — a native iMessage/SMS/RCS client reading chat.db read-only	you want to change the Messages client
🐈 perch	the shelf — a native notch file tray that stages dropped files and drags them out as one group	you want to change the file shelf
🌫 nebelung	the colours — a silver-mist Catppuccin variant + per-tool theme templates	you want a different shade of fog
🍺 homebrew-tap	the Homebrew tap (brew tap nebelhaus/tap)	almost never — CI bumps it on every release
🧰 workshop	every repo checked out side-by-side + the bench dev CLI	you’re hacking on the family itself

Your private machine config — identity, secrets, your app roster — lives at ~/.config/nix and is yours, never part of the rice.

The CLIs at a glance

There are four command-line tools in nebelhaus, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion. Two jobs, four commands — and if you only use nebelhaus, you only ever need the first one:

Command	You reach for it to…	Works on	Ships in
haus	drive your own machine — rebuild, update, roll back, diagnose	your Mac (~/.config/nix)	the rice — every install has it
wt	manage agent worktrees — safe parallel agents, resumable panes	any git repo	the rice — every install has it
bench	move a change across the family repos — try, ship, release	the workshop checkouts	the workshop — contributors only
zscratch	feel-test a zellij edit with no rebuild	the rice’s zellij config	the rice — for rice contributors

haus and bench never overlap — they’re named differently on purpose so they can’t shadow each other. haus knows only your machine; bench knows only the family repos. wt and zscratch are dev tools the rice puts on your PATH whether or not you ever contribute — wt especially is worth knowing for anyone who runs Claude Code, nebelhaus contributor or not.

The rooms, standalone

• pounce installs from Homebrew (brew install pounce) with zero Nix. It’s a general command palette; the rice just wires it up.
• perch is a plain menu-bar app — the notch file shelf — that needs none of the rest of the family to run.
• nebelung is a plain colour system. Any tool — Ghostty, bat, lazygit, Slack, Zen — can consume its rendered themes without touching the rest.
• nebelhaus is the whole system, but its modules (den, hearth, prowl, sill, collar, pounce, hush, secrets) are exported individually so you can cherry-pick.

How they feed each other

The repos form a chain of pinned flake inputs. Each link is a flake input — a reference to an exact commit, recorded in the downstream repo’s flake.lock:

The catch that surprises everyone: a flake input is not “whatever is on GitHub right now” — it’s a frozen commit hash. So pushing a change to nebelung changes nothing downstream until each downstream flake.lock is bumped to the new commit. That’s what makes rebuilds reproducible, and it’s why updating is a deliberate nix flake update, not automatic.

As an end user you rarely feel this — haus update handles it. It matters if you contribute to the family or want to understand how the flakes fit together.

Built on

nebelhaus stands on the shoulders of excellent open-source projects:

• Nix & nix-darwin — reproducible system config
• AeroSpace — the tiling window manager
• SketchyBar — the status bar
• Catppuccin — the colour framework nebelung is derived from
• Ghostty, zellij, yazi, helix, starship — the terminal stack

All of nebelhaus is MIT-licensed.