Windshift on a TRMNL e-ink display
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TRMNL is a simple ePaper display that shows open Windshift items and today's summary at a glance, so you can stay focused and switch tabs less often. Two small plugins make it work, with nothing to install on the server.
I recently added a TRMNL X to my desk. It sits next to my laptop and my monitor as a minimum-distraction information display: one screen, no notifications, no apps, no browser chrome. E-ink redraws every so often and then gets out of the way.
Thats a totally different experience from a work tracker in the browser. A dashboard in a separate tab competes with every other tab and usually loses, because why would you revisit that tab? The display on my desk wins by not participating in that fight. When I look up from work, it is simply there, telling me whether the day is on track.
Two screens
The task list shows the open work items matching a Windshift QL query, newest first, with key, status, and priority.
The daily summary answers the questions you would otherwise open the app for: open, due today, overdue, and closed today, plus a *Next up* row with the soonest-due item and the current milestone, and everything that moved today.
Quiet by design
Nothing is installed into Windshift and nothing runs on your server. Each plugin polls the public REST API from TRMNL's cloud with a personal token that is read-only, so the screen can show the state of your work but never change it.
Because the display pulls instead of pushing, it never interrupts. No pings, no badges, nothing moving in the corner of your eye. The image only changes when the work has changed. That quietly retires the habit of opening the tracker every half hour just to check whether something moved, because the answer is already on the wall.
Setup
Create a token under **Profile > API Tokens**, then create two private plugins on trmnl.com and paste the markup from `plugin-src/trmnl` in the Windshift repository, or push them with `trmnlp`. The query is ordinary Windshift QL, and `assignee = currentUser()` resolves to whoever owns the token, so the same setup works for everyone on the team.
One caveat: the polling happens on TRMNL's servers, so your Windshift instance must be reachable from the public internet. But you can `self-host` TRMNL's server and hosted installations don't have this limitation.