Your Wallpaper Is Your Incident Dashboard

What goes on the wallpaper

Add an ext: github:cemheren/quicksheet-<name> cell to install any extension. No package manager, no daemon config.

During an incident

Five questions every on-call answers in the first 5 minutes. Now you can answer them without opening a browser tab.

• 1

  Which services are degraded?

  Put a health: https://your-endpoint.com row per service. Probes run in parallel; green ✓ or red ✗ refreshes on every activation.

• 2

  Is it us or the vendor?

  apistatus: github, apistatus: cloudflare, apistatus: aws — one row each. Checks live Statuspage.io APIs. Immediately tells you if it's your infra or theirs.

• 3

  Is it the cert?

  tls: api.example.com shows days remaining. Expired certs cause deceptively generic errors and are easy to miss without a dedicated monitor.

• 4

  What changed recently?

  gitlog: /path/to/repo 10 shows the last 10 commits. Paste a hash into a runnable cell: r: git show <hash> — press Enter to run.

• 5

  Is the pod actually running?

  k8s: production lists pods and their status without opening another terminal tab.

On-call utilities

Two tools that come up in every auth or API routing incident.

Runnable cells

Prefix any cell with r: to make it a one-keypress shell command. Press Enter to run; output replaces cell content.

r: kubectl get nodes
r: docker ps --format "table {{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}"
r: systemctl status nginx
r: journalctl -u myservice --since "5 min ago" --no-pager
r: curl -s https://api.example.com/health | jq .status

Why wallpaper beats a Grafana tab

Build your own in 50 lines

Don't see an extension for your specific service? The protocol is two message types: register and write. Standard-library Python, Go, or Bash is enough.

# Python skeleton — reads stdin, writes cells to stdout
import json, sys

line = input()
msg = json.loads(line)
if msg["type"] == "register":
    print(json.dumps({"type":"register","prefix":"myext","width":1,"height":3}))
    sys.stdout.flush()

for line in sys.stdin:
    msg = json.loads(line)
    if msg["type"] == "activate":
        cells = [{"r":0,"c":0,"v":"🟢 healthy"},{"r":1,"c":0,"v":"latency: 12ms"}]
        print(json.dumps({"type":"write","id":msg["id"],"cells":cells}))
        sys.stdout.flush()

Full spec: docs/extension-protocol.md