Courant

A cozy reminder for developers — drink water, rest your eyes, stretch.

Linux desktop app that fires customizable system notifications, tracks your daily progress, and serves a small web UI on localhost:8765 for CRUD and stats. The UI features a full-screen ambient scene (ocean depth, rain, sunset, forest, or night sky) with a glassmorphism panel on top. The product name "Courant" means current / flow in French — the gentle stream that nudges you toward healthier breaks.

Status

• ✅ Phase 1 — Core CLI + desktop notifications working end-to-end
• ✅ Phase 2 — Functional web UI (FastAPI + HTMX)
• ✅ Phase 3 — Cozy aesthetic with ambient scenes (ocean, rain, sunset, forest, night)
• ✅ Phase 4 — systemd integration + PyPI publish + ambient audio

Quick start

pipx install courant
courant install-scenes        # ~10 MB of ambient videos
courant install-audio         # ~2 MB of ambient sounds (optional)
courant install               # creates a systemd user service (auto-starts at login)

The web UI is at http://localhost:8765.

Manual / dev install

git clone https://github.com/BryanBradfo/courant
cd courant
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
courant install-scenes

courant start    # foreground daemon
courant status   # (in another terminal) see configured reminders
# Ctrl+C in the daemon terminal to stop

On first launch, three default reminders are seeded:

All reminders fire only between 09:00–18:00 on weekdays by default. You can customize all of this from the web UI at http://localhost:8765/reminders while the daemon is running, or directly in the SQLite database at ~/.local/share/courant/courant.db.

Installing the ambient scenes

Courant uses 6 looping background videos (~10 MB total, re-encoded from larger originals) for the cozy aesthetic. They are not bundled in the repo — fetch them with :

courant install-scenes

Progress is shown per scene. Files land in ~/.local/share/courant/videos/. If some downloads fail, re-run the command — it skips already-installed scenes.

Until you install them, you'll see a fallback gradient background.

Usage

After courant start, point your browser at http://localhost:8765 :

• Dashboard — see each reminder's daily progress and click +1 to log a hit
• Reminders — create / edit / disable / delete reminders
• Stats — daily progress per reminder
• Settings — global preferences (e.g. snooze duration)

Notifications fire on the desktop via D-Bus as configured. Clicking a notification action ("+1 glass" or "Snooze 10 min") records an event in the same database the web UI reads from — both views stay in sync.

Scenes

Courant ships with 5 ambient scenes you can choose from in Settings :

Want to add your own ? See docs/ADDING_A_SCENE.md.

Tests

pytest -v

Currently 84 tests covering models, SQLite repository, business logic, scheduler integration, the FastAPI web UI, and CLI smoke tests (including a subprocess test that verifies the daemon actually serves HTTP).

Roadmap

This is a phased build. See docs/superpowers/specs/ for the design spec (currently in French, English translation welcome) and docs/superpowers/plans/ for phase-by-phase implementation plans.

Contributions are welcome — especially:

• Translations of user-facing strings and design docs
• New ambient scenes (each scene is a self-contained Canvas module — see docs/ADDING_A_SCENE.md)
• Bug reports from running on non-GNOME desktops (Plasma, XFCE, Hyprland…)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.