Never wonder which machine you just remoted into.
Nameplate brands every machine in your fleet — macOS, Windows, and Linux — with an unmistakable identity — a colored frame, a name tag, a watermark, a connect splash. All click-through overlays. Your wallpaper stays untouched, and fullscreen apps can't hide it.
Don't screenshot it. Click it.
A faithful remake of the real Settings window — and it's live. Everything you change here restyles the nameplate this page is wearing.
An aircraft livery for your machines.
01Frame
A colored border around every display, rounded corners following the screen's curve. Always visible, costs zero pixels of workspace, survives fullscreen apps.
02Name tag
A small pill with the Mac's name and an optional emoji glyph, pinned to a corner. Like the one at the bottom of this page.
03Watermark
A big translucent name across the screen, readable from across the room. It's behind this text right now.
04Connect splash
The Mac's name flashes center-screen when a remote session likely just started, then fades out. No more typing hostname to be sure.
05Menu bar plate
A colored mini-nameplate in the menu bar. Its menu is a glanceable dashboard: uptime, IP (click to copy), CPU, RAM, free disk.
06Attention alerts
A bundled CLI summons a topmost message card with pulsating borders when an agent or script needs the human at the keyboard.
Brand the whole herd from one dotfile.
Nameplate reads ~/.config/nameplate/fleet.json, keyed by short hostname. Sync it via your dotfiles and every Mac picks up its own entry — live, no restart.
Even an unconfigured fleet is instantly tellable-apart: each Mac gets a stable default color derived from its hostname.
Decorations can show only when viewed remotely — Nameplate detects virtual displays (Jump Desktop and friends) and active Screen Sharing/VNC connections, and stays invisible while you're sitting at the Mac.
{
"megaclaw": { "name": "MEGACLAW",
"color": "#1D9E75",
"glyph": "🦞" },
"clawmac": { "name": "clawmac",
"color": "#E24B30",
"glyph": "🔥" },
"studio-1": { "color": "#7F77DD" }
}
Your AI can now knock on the screen.
The bundled CLI lets agents and scripts summon a topmost attention card with pulsating screen borders — with the reason right in the alert. Built for the moment right before a 1Password prompt, when the agent needs a human and the human is making coffee.
An agent skill ships in the repo. Darwin notifications work from anywhere, including SSH, with no app activation.
# agent needs the human nameplate attention \ "Need 1Password approval" \ --title "Codex → 1Password" --duration 12 # replay the identity splash, from ssh too notifyutil -p com.steipete.nameplate.splash
Mac, Windows, Linux. Same livery.
One product, three platforms — same fleet file, same colors, same CLI. macOS release builds auto-update via Sparkle.
MIT licensed. No accounts, no telemetry, no network calls except the update check.
# macOS brew install --cask steipete/tap/nameplate # or the DMG # Windows (x64/arm64) — tray app + CLI, one exe Nameplate-Windows-x64.zip from the latest release # Linux (X11 fleets; deps: libgtk-4) Nameplate-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz from the latest release