Notifications

Deska raises a native operating system notification when a coding agent finishes its turn, when an agent is waiting on you, when a terminal command that ran for at least thirty seconds completes, and when Deska or one of your agent CLIs installs an update. Clicking one brings Deska forward and jumps straight to the terminal that raised it, switching workspaces first if the terminal lives in another one.

The switches live under Settings (Cmd/Ctrl,) and then Notifications. Two master switches come first, both on out of the box:

• Enable notifications: the master switch for alerts on this machine.
• Only when window unfocused: skip the alert while Deska is the focused window, on the theory that you can already see what happened.

Below them, each kind of alert has its own switch, all on by default: An agent needs you, An agent finished, A long command finished and Updates installed, which covers Deska or one of your agent CLIs updating itself. A kind only alerts while both its own switch and Enable notifications are on.

The same events can reach the Deska mobile app. Turn on Send push to my phone in Settings and then Notifications. You need to be signed in, because push travels through your Deska account rather than a direct connection between the two devices.

Because the settings live on your account, the desktop and the phone edit the same preferences. Change a switch in the mobile app and the desktop shows the new value the next time you open that page, and the other way round.

Push is separate from remote access, and turning one on does not turn on the other. Remote access is what lets you open the computer once a notification has told you something happened.

Each kind of event has its own switch, so you can keep the ones that matter and mute the rest:

• Agent finished: a coding agent finished its turn. On by default.
• Agent needs input: an agent is waiting for your response. On by default, and the only category sent at high priority so your phone treats it as urgent.
• Command finished: a long-running terminal command completed. Off by default.
• Command failed: reserved for a terminal command exiting with an error. Deska does not send these yet, so the switch has no effect for now.
• New device connected: a device reached one of your computers for the first time. On by default, because it is the signal behind connecting without a pairing code.

These switches apply to the phone. The alerts on this computer have their own per-kind switches, covered in the section above.

By default you are not paged for things happening on the screen in front of you. Only when I’m away is on out of the box, and while it is on Deska skips the phone push whenever the event fired with the desktop window active. Turn it off if you want the phone to buzz for everything, even while you are sitting at the machine.

Three things have to line up before a phone push is sent:

1. Send push to my phone is on.
2. The category of the event is on.
3. Either Only when I’m away is off, or the desktop was not active when the event fired.

A push carries just enough context to take you back to what raised it. Tapping one opens the Deska app and lands on the right place:

• An alert from a terminal or an agent session opens that session’s window, ready to read the output or type a reply.
• An alert from a supervised agent thread opens the Inbox tab focused on that thread. See Agent threads.
• Anything else, including a notification whose target has gone away, lands on the Home dashboard rather than guessing.

There is nothing to pair. Sign in to the Deska mobile app with your Deska account and allow notifications when the phone asks, and that device registers itself for push. A simulator cannot receive push, so this needs a real phone.

Signing out of the mobile app removes that phone’s registration, and it stops receiving notifications immediately. Signing in again registers it afresh, including under a different account.

Every install that touched your account is listed under Devices in the mobile app’s settings, each with a Revoke button. Revoking cuts that device off from your computers and your account, and a revoked device cannot re-register itself; you have to add it back deliberately. If a phone stops receiving alerts and is not listed, open the app and sign in again.

If notifications never arrive, check the operating system permission for the Deska app first, then Troubleshooting & FAQ. What a push payload contains is covered in Privacy & your data.