What's new in Hydrogen: the weekend of 12 to 14 September 2026

Hydrogen Desktop went from 1.0.344 to 1.0.403 over the weekend, with adom-vscode 1.1.48 to 1.1.76 and hydrogen-bootstrap 0.5.29 to 0.5.50 alongside. Every box on the auto-update train has it. This page is the tour; each section links to the page with the details.

Hydrogen Widgets: small live panels in the Title Bar

A new puzzle-piece icon in the Title Bar opens the Hydrogen Widgets pulldown. Each widget is a small page served by a program inside your workspace, shown in a sandboxed slot in the Title Bar. Three ship today:

• Claude usage: your 5-hour session, your weekly limit and the weekly model bucket that applies (Fable, Opus), as percent used, straight from your Claude Code sign-in.
• Codex usage: your plan's rate-limit window, from your Codex sign-in.
• Clock: the time and date, and the smallest possible widget, the one to copy.

The slots stack their rows in the full Title Bar and go to one row in the compact one, and each slot is exactly as wide as its widget asks for. Open widgets come back after a restart. Hover a slot for a card that says what it shows and how often it asks. Any wiki repo can ship a widget with a hydrogen-widget.json, private repos included, and your AI has the hydrogen-widget skill plus a control API (GET /widgets, POST /widgets/open) to drive all of it.

Read more: Hydrogen Widgets, Claude and Codex usage, Clock.

Project workspaces: the layout a project ships

A project can now carry its own desktop layout (hydrogen/workspace.json: panes, tabs, the apps and bridges it needs). The grid icon next to the Adom logo lists every project workspace in your checkouts and the cloud mirror; Apply adds its tabs to this desktop, Unload removes exactly what Apply created, and Save as project workspace exports your live layout back into the project. A hydrogen:// link opens one from anywhere (a wiki page, a chat message). Your AI drives it through /workspaces/* on the control API and the hydrogen-project-workspaces skill.

Read more: Project workspaces, with a narrated demo video.

Report a problem, from the Adom menu

Adom menu, Report a problem... files an issue on the Hydrogen wiki page in your name with the last part of Hydrogen's log and the Doctor's checks attached. One line is enough. It works on the first-run screen too, so a setup that goes wrong can be reported from the box it went wrong on.

Your layout comes back

Webview tabs and panel splits now persist per signed-in user and are restored before the editor builds its default, so Hydrogen opens the way you left it. Reset to default layout (in the Project workspaces menu) brings the stock panes back.

The workspace meter, honest and harmless

The CPU/RAM/GPU meter reads the workspace over HTTP through the adom-vscode extension, never through a wsl.exe call, so a busy workspace cannot stall the app. Health messages say what was actually checked. Inside the workspace, memory guardrails protect the infrastructure (code-server, the relay) from a runaway process, and if Linux has to kill something you get a toast naming the victim. File uploads go the same HTTP way and a failure carries its reason. The meter tooltip is a table with one denominator and names which GPU. Hydrogen and its WebView2 processes run above normal priority, so the window stays responsive during a cold editor load.

Recovery has one vocabulary

What used to be wake, restart, editor reload and manual check is now one feature, Recovery, with a shield indicator in the Title Bar (sync, check, alert) that names its reason and shows its log on hover. Settings has a switch per recovery step, a master switch for all of it, a Codex section with its own master switch (the Codex warm-up runs only when Hydrogen asks), and a passive internet watch under Watchers. The offline verdict takes two missed probes, not one.

The bell keeps its buttons

A waiting approval in the bell keeps its buttons across restarts, the click relays to Adom Bridge and the outcome is read back, and each row shows its decision time.

The Adom menu fits the window

The Adom menu and the profile menu now fit the window and scroll when it is too short, so nothing is cut off on a laptop screen.

Annotate and the bell, now documented

Two Title Bar controls that were never written up: the pencil (Annotate: draw on the screen, the marked-up area lands on your clipboard as a PNG to paste into an AI thread) and the bell (a one-time switch for browser notifications from the editor). Both are on the main page now, and your AI has the new hydrogen-annotate skill.

adom-vscode

• The title-bar AI menu detects which AIs are installed, paints from cache, fits the window and installs missing ones.
• A Codex Sessions side bar; the Codex warm-up runs only when Hydrogen asks and reports its timing.
• POST /fs/write and GET /stats so Hydrogen Desktop never spawns wsl.exe to land a file or read the meter.
• The two usage widgets and the widget helper (hydrogen-widget-lib.py) that any widget can copy.

Issue triage

All 39 open issues on the Hydrogen wiki page were reviewed together and closed: fixed (#4, #49, #50, #52, #75, #76, #17), taken over by the Dock Bar thread (#48), or closed as no longer applicable (#1, #10, #45, #47, #56, #67, #77 and the rest). The page has zero open issues.

Skills every Adom user gets

The bootstraps ship every public Hydrogen skill: hydrogen-widget, hydrogen-project-workspaces, hydrogen-annotate and the updated hydrogen-notifications are new this weekend, and hydrogen-api carries the new routes (/widgets/*, /workspaces/*, /report/problem, /annotate).

Versions