The dashboard
The dashboard is Pepper on a screen. It runs on the Mac that runs Pepper.
The dashboard is off until you set it up. On its own it is reachable only on the Mac itself, on 127.0.0.1
port 7777. Tailscale Serve makes it reachable from your other devices
over HTTPS. Tailscale is a private network between your own devices; the steps marked You are ones only you
can do.
-
You: install Tailscale on the Mac and on each phone or laptop you'll use, signed in to the same account.
-
You: on the Mac, make the port reachable on your Tailscale network (your tailnet):
tailscale serve --bg 7777Tailscale prints the HTTPS address to use, such as
https://your-mac.your-tailnet.ts.net. -
Add two lines to Pepper's
.env, its settings file:PEPPER_DASH_USERS=<your Tailscale login> # the login shown in Tailscale; comma-separate more than one PEPPER_DASH_ORIGIN=https://your-mac.your-tailnet.ts.net -
Restart Pepper. Its log says "Today page on 127.0.0.1:7777".
npm run doctorshows a dashboard line too. -
Open the HTTPS address from step 2 in a browser on any of your devices.
To use another port, set PEPPER_DASH_PORT and serve that port instead. Leaving PEPPER_DASH_USERS empty turns
the dashboard off.
Opening http://127.0.0.1:7777 directly in a browser on the Mac gets "Forbidden". Every request must come
through Tailscale Serve, which tells Pepper who you are. Use the HTTPS address, even on the Mac itself.
You can get in through the address in PEPPER_DASH_ORIGIN only if your Tailscale login is listed in
PEPPER_DASH_USERS. Each browser stays signed in for 30 days, and every button carries a token tied to that
sign-in. Restarting Pepper signs every browser out; the next page load signs you back in. This keeps other
people out, not other programs on the Mac: a program running as the same macOS user as Pepper could forge the
login. More in
How Pepper keeps your data safe.
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Today | A greeting, up to three lines on what changed since the last brief, one item to start with, and what needs you next |
| Follow-ups | Two lists, what you owe and what you're owed, plus your priorities for the week |
| People | Your VIPs with what each side owes, and up to eight other named people who wrote most in the last 30 days |
| Schedule | Dated deadlines in order, with a line marking now. See Schedule |
| Review | What Pepper found and wants you to confirm or dismiss, one card at a time. See Review |
| Routines | Your scheduled jobs and whether they ran. See Routines |
| Connections | Connected services, their health and sync controls. See Connections |
Follow-ups, Review and Routines show a small count when something is waiting.
Every line in the tabs comes from what Pepper stored. Where it quotes a message, the quote is labelled Source says and was checked against the message, ignoring case and spacing. When there is nothing recorded, the page says so instead of guessing.
Rows in Follow-ups have three buttons: Done (or Got it), Tomorrow and Not a task. Each makes the change at once and offers Undo: the button shows for a few seconds, and undo still works for 10 minutes, until you leave or reload the page. See Follow-ups for what each button does.
On a laptop, Follow-ups also works from the keyboard:
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| J and K | Move down and up the rows |
| E | Done, or Got it |
| T | Tomorrow |
| X | Not a task |
| U | Undo the last action |
| / | Jump to the Ask bar |
The dashboard works without JavaScript too. Every button submits a plain form, and the page reloads with the result.
The bar at the bottom of every tab says "Ask Pepper anything…". Type a question and press Enter. The answer appears at the top of the page, with the people and chats it drew on. If any of its citations couldn't be checked against a stored message, a red label shows how many could not be verified.
Ask on the dashboard uses the same engine as asking Pepper on Telegram. See Ask. If you've paused
Pepper with /halt on Telegram, a question gets a paused message instead of an answer until you send
/resume.
Open Settings, the gear at the foot of the left rail (the strip of tabs) on a laptop or at the top right on a phone, and choose Match device, Light or Dark. See Themes.
On a phone, the tabs sit in a bar along the bottom of the screen and the Ask bar sits just above it. On a screen 1024 pixels wide or more, the tabs move to a rail on the left. Today is laid out to fit one phone screen and shows three items under "Then", the list of what needs you next, where a laptop shows five.
Add it to your phone's home screen to open it full screen, with Pepper's icon. After five minutes away, it refreshes when you come back.
The dashboard has no page for .env, so API keys, tokens and passwords never appear, and it never opens a
routine's private files. For routines it shows only what the routine wrote about itself, as plain text, so keep
secrets out of what a routine writes.
The page loads nothing from other sites, runs no inline scripts, and turns no message text into links.
Asking Pepper
You can ask Pepper anything about the chats you connect and the things it tracks for you, in plain words. It answers briefly, with its sources.
Routines
A routine is a small program you write to do a job, such as downloading a weekly report from a site you log in to. The Mac runs it on a schedule, and Pepper watches it. Every field and rule is in…