The parts that are not zones, workspaces or hotkeys.
| Pulse | One session that holds the Mac up, and optionally holds your chat status at available with it. The first level is IOKit power assertions, not a jiggler: nothing is typed and nothing moves. The second adds the only thing in Plonk that fakes input, because nothing else can — Slack and Teams read how long it is since the last keypress, and a power assertion never touches that number, so a Shift every two minutes resets it. That reset postpones sleep by itself, which is why these are two levels of one thing rather than two switches: being available always included being awake, and the old pair let you turn on the half that could not do the job. A session starts by hand, on a schedule (hours and weekdays, and a window may cross midnight), while a chosen app is open, while the Mac is charging, or from an agent — and ends when you say: after N minutes, at a wall-clock time, or the moment a process exits. plonk awake while npm run build holds the Mac up for exactly as long as the build lasts and not a second longer. Display-on or system-only, and pause on battery if you want it. Closing the lid is a forced sleep no assertion can hold off, so the lid-closed switch is a different animal: it turns system sleep off outright, asks for your password once, and a root guard puts it back when you switch it off, and within a minute of Plonk being gone for good. The guard outlives a relaunch, so an update does not ask again. The menu bar cube goes half red while it is on |
| Screenshots | Region, window or screen through the native picker, then pen, arrow, rectangle, ellipse and highlighter. Saves at native resolution |
| Text | ⌃⌥T selects an area and copies the words in it, including text that is only pixels — a screenshot, a paused video, a PDF that will not let you select. Recognition is on-device; plonk text | grep … works too |
| Ruler | ⌃⌥R, then hover: Plonk reads the pixels and measures how far the pointer can travel each way before it meets an edge — the width of a row, the height of a bar, the gap between two things — and draws each run as its own dimension line. Drag instead for a straight-line distance. Points and pixels both, because a 44-point tap target is 88 pixels and only one of those numbers is in the asset. Click copies, Space re-photographs the screen, Escape ends it |
| Pinned crops | ⌃⌥P drags out a region and floats it above everything, mirroring whatever is underneath. ⌃⌥⇧P freezes it instead. Streamed, never written down |
| Shortcut guide | ⌃⌥⇧/ lists every shortcut the front app has, read from its own menus rather than from a table someone has to keep up to date |
| Pointer | Find the cursor, ring every click for a screen recording, crosshairs, and a key that warps the pointer to the next display. Each is drawn in the zone colour until it is given one of its own, and the ring picks its shape, size, line weight and how long it lasts; right clicks can be a different colour from left ones |
| Grab and move | Hold a key and drag a window from anywhere inside it; right-drag resizes from the nearest edge. Off by default, because option-drag already means something in plenty of apps |
| Notices | A panel in the top-right corner, not Notification Center: no permission to ask for, nothing left in your history, and it can show the screenshot instead of describing it |
| Tools | A switch for each of zones, workspaces, screenshots, pointer tools, the ruler, voice and Pulse, under Tools in the menu bar dropdown and on the Tools page. Off means off everywhere: the page leaves the sidebar, its entry leaves the menu, its shortcuts are released to other apps, its manager stands down, and its routes answer an agent with a 409 saying which tool is off. disabled_features in /state is that list. Settings are kept, so switching one back on restores what was there. The shortcut guide and the command palette have no switch, being the app itself rather than a module |
| Updates | One button on the Updates page. The download is checked against the checksum GitHub published for it before it is unpacked, and Plonk installs a build only if it is signed with the same certificate as the copy you are running — the same test macOS applies, so your Accessibility and Screen Recording grants carry over instead of being asked for again. Anything that fails is discarded and nothing is replaced. Switch the check off and the app never looks |
Zones · Workspaces · Hotkeys · Coming from Rectangle · README