LifeOS
Spinner

Custom Spinner Verbs

Last synced: Jul 11, 2026

Custom Spinner Verbs

While LifeOS works, the statusline doesn’t just show a generic spinner — it shows a custom animated working-verb with your own vocabulary, icon, color, and animation. It’s a small thing that makes the system feel like yours instead of a stock tool. Alongside the verb, a rotating set of tips surfaces short, current facts about the system while you wait.

Verbs and tips are two distinct features that share the statusline:

  • Spinner verbs — the animated working word (“Composing”, “Forging”, “Climbing”) plus its icon, color, and animation.
  • Spinner tips — the informational strings that rotate during longer work, kept in sync with the system’s real state.

Spinner verbs

The verb vocabulary and its styling are defined once as customization assets and pushed to the live config.

  • Source of truth: LIFEOS/USER/CUSTOMIZATIONS/Spinner/ — verbs.json (the working words), icons.json, colors.json, anims.json, plus a README.md.
  • Live config: settings.json → spinnerVerbs.verbs.
  • Sync tool: LIFEOS/TOOLS/SyncSpinnerAssets.ts pushes verbs/icons/colors/anims from the customization dir out to the live config and to downstream projects.
  • Statusline renderer: LIFEOS/LIFEOS_StatusLine.sh.

To change the vocabulary, edit the customization JSON and re-run the sync tool — never hand-edit the live config, so the source stays canonical.

Spinner tips

The tips are short informational strings shown during longer operations. They’re kept accurate against the current system — skill counts, hook counts, version strings — by a dedicated maintenance workflow.

  • Live config: settings.json → spinnerTipsOverride.tips.
  • Maintenance: the /ut (UpdateTips) workflow in the _LIFEOS skill audits and refreshes the tips against the current skill/hook/agent counts and versions. Run /ut after a system change so the tips never go stale.
  • The statusline these render in is part of the overall system surface.
  • Pulse — the Life Dashboard: LIFEOS/DOCUMENTATION/Pulse/PulseSystem.md
  • LifeOS maintenance (the /ut workflow lives here): the _LIFEOS skill.