Flash

A macOS menu-bar app that lights up your screen edges when something is waiting on you:
a security key touch, a keychain prompt, or an agent's git push stuck on a passphrase.

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · no dependencies · MIT

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What it catches

Waiting on you	How
FIDO / passkey touch (browser, WebAuthn)	Watches USB security-key traffic
SSH commit signing with an sk- key	git-ssh-keygen-flash wrapper
Keychain, password, Touch ID, GPG PIN dialogs	Watches for those system dialogs on screen
git/ssh passphrase, PIN, credential, key touch	flash-askpass

It also keeps an activity log of commits and successful pushes, with agent vs you, in the menu-bar panel. The log never flashes.

Install

Download Flash-x.y.dmg from Releases and drag it to Applications. If macOS blocks the first launch: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.

Git setup (optional, pick what you need)

R=/Applications/Flash.app/Contents/Resources

# Alert on SSH commit signing with a security key
git config --global gpg.format ssh
git config --global commit.gpgsign true
git config --global user.signingkey ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_sk.pub
git config --global gpg.ssh.program "$R/git-ssh-keygen-flash"

# HTTPS credential prompts → dialog + alert
git config --global core.askPass "$R/flash-askpass"

# Activity log: record who made each commit/push (agent vs you)
git config --global core.hooksPath "$R/git-hooks"

• ssh prompts (passphrase, PIN, key touch): turn on Settings → Detection → SSH prompts via Flash. This also reaches agents in GUI apps like Claude.app. Relaunch those apps afterwards.
• Global hooks run each repo's own hooks first, unchanged. Repos with their own core.hooksPath (husky, lefthook) keep it. Undo with git config --global --unset core.hooksPath.
• Apple's ssh-keygen lacks FIDO support? Run brew install openssh and set FLASH_SSH_KEYGEN=/opt/homebrew/bin/ssh-keygen.

Use

Left-click icon	Status, touches today, recent activity, style switcher, tests
Right-click icon	Plain menu
Settings (⌘,)	Alerts (style, 13 colours, reminders) · Detection (prompts, ssh, activity folders) · About
Logs	~/Library/Logs/Flash.log

Build

make run       # build + run in the foreground, logs to the terminal
make install   # → /Applications/Flash.app
make selftest  # with Flash running: triggers every detection path, pass/fail per step

Architecture, adding alert styles and releasing are covered in DEVELOPMENT.md.