Introducing Modern — and why we're making more dashboard UIs

If you've opened Monospace today you'll spot a new card in Appearance → Dashboard UI. Alongside the familiar Classic layout there's now a second option called Modern — a desktop shell with a compact top bar, a narrower sidebar, and an inline search that expands right where it sits. You can try it, keep it, revert, or switch back and forth anytime.

Modern is the first of several desktop shells we're planning. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and why more shells is the direction we're heading.

What Modern is

Modern is a different arrangement of the same app. Every project item you had in Classic — boards, tasks, notes, chat, calendar, subscriptions, detectors, the lot — still lives exactly where it did. The data is identical. Settings are shared. Mobile is untouched. What changes is the chrome around it.

The biggest differences you'll notice:

• Top bar with inline search — a search pill lives in the top bar and widens to a full input when you focus it (or press ⌘K). Results drop down right beneath it: project names, individual boards by name, task lists, detectors. Pressing Escape or clicking away closes it, and the rest of the screen dims slightly while you're searching so the input visually lifts.
• Narrower sidebar — the sidebar is tighter by default, with a pill-style selected state and a bit more whitespace between items.
• Individual boards, task lists, and detectors — each shows in the sidebar with its real name, not a single collapsed "Boards" label. Classic has always done this; Modern finally matches.
• Drag-and-drop everywhere — drag to reorder organisations, projects inside an org, and item categories within a project. A faint grip handle fades in on hover so dragging never fights your clicks.
• Hover gear + add buttons — hover any project or item and two controls fade in: a plus to add something new, a gear for settings. The gear opens the same menu the right-click does, so there's only ever one menu to learn.
• Right-click context menus matching Classic — copy name, open settings, pin, ask the AI, delete — on projects, on items, on org headers, and even on empty sidebar space (where it gives you Paste / Select All / Refresh rather than letting the browser default leak through).

Sidebar resizing and left/right placement — now on every UI

One change that lands with this release but isn't specific to Modern: the sidebar width slider and left/right placement picker in Appearance now apply to any dashboard UI that has a sidebar. The old small / medium / large enum is gone. Drag the slider to pick any width between 180 and 360 pixels — icons, labels, and padding scale in lockstep — or flip the sidebar to the right edge if that's your thing. Whatever you choose carries across Classic, Modern, and any future shell.

What isn't different

Just as important as what Modern changes: everything else stays the same.

• Your theme (light / dark / OLED), accent colour, Background gradients, glass mode, and all the Look variants apply on Modern the same way they do on Classic.
• Your expanded projects and collapsed orgs now sync between Classic and Modern, and across devices. Expand a project on your laptop in Modern, open the app on your phone, or flip back to Classic — same tree, same state.
• The AI chat widget, the status banner, the offline indicator, and the ask-AI-about-this shortcuts on every context menu — all present.
• Mobile still renders the mobile layout regardless of which desktop shell you've picked. Choosing Modern on desktop doesn't change a thing on your phone.

Try it without commitment

We wanted switching to feel low-stakes. Each card in the Dashboard UI picker has a Try button beside it. Clicking Try starts a 15-minute timed preview — a small bar at the top counts down. During the preview you can hit Keep to make it permanent, or Revert to go straight back. If you do nothing, it auto-reverts when the timer runs out.

The preview syncs cross-device, so if you start on one laptop and move to another mid-session, the preview comes with you rather than dying when you switch tabs.

Classic users also see a dismissible banner once, inviting you to try Modern. Dismiss it or switch — either way, it goes away.

Why we're making more than one

Modern isn't the end. It's the first of a few dashboard shells we're planning, each with its own personality and rhythm.

The reason is simple: the same data looks different depending on how you work. Someone running a twenty-person organisation with a busy ticket queue and daily standups wants different chrome than a solo founder tracking three personal projects. A developer who lives in their terminal wants minimalism; a project manager wants information density. One shell can't be ideal for all of them — but the data under it is the same, so we don't have to pick.

That's the whole idea behind the Dashboard UI picker: a thin swap of the chrome, with themes, accents, backgrounds, settings, mobile, and your actual data all stable underneath.

What's coming

We've sketched a handful of shell ideas already — denser grid-style layouts, a rail-only ultra-minimal mode, a top-heavy shell with always-on breadcrumbs, an explorer-style three-column view. We'll ship them as Pro+ options in the same picker so they're all discoverable in one place, all previewable, all swappable at any time.

The first few will probably roll out over the next month or so. If you have a shell you'd love to see, let us know.

A few tips if you switch today

1. The picker lives at Appearance → Dashboard UI, above the existing Look section.
2. ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) focuses the top-bar search from anywhere.
3. The sidebar-width slider and left/right picker now apply to any shell that has a sidebar — including Classic. Set it once in Appearance and it sticks.
4. In Modern's collapsed rail, hover over a project icon to see a popover with the project name and all its items — handy for keeping more content on screen.
5. Right-click on empty sidebar space still brings up Paste / Select All / Refresh. The custom menu never lets the browser default leak through.
6. Tickets show a live badge (open or unreplied, based on each project's settings) and respect whether you've pinned Tickets to the top or bottom of the project's item list.

Thanks for using Monospace.

— Cam