Notifications

Plank runs tasks that take minutes or hours. If you leave the chat — or leave the app entirely — nothing used to tell you when it was done. Notifications close that gap.

The three events

Plank can notify you when:

• A task finishes. Your assistant is done and the result is ready.
• A task needs your answer. Your assistant is blocked on a question and can't continue without you.
• A task fails. Something went wrong and the task stopped.

Each has its own on/off switch in Settings → Notifications.

Plank stays quiet about a chat you're looking at

If you're actively looking at a chat — it's open and your phone or browser tab is in front of you — Plank won't notify you about that chat. You're already watching it happen; a notification would just be noise.

Switch to a different chat, or put the app in the background, and that chat becomes eligible for notifications again. If you'd rather be notified even for the chat you have open, turn off Don't notify for the open chat in Settings — it's on by default, but it's your call.

Quiet hours

Set a quiet-hours window (for example 22:00–08:00) and Plank won't send finished or failed notifications during it. It doesn't matter what else is happening — nothing arrives until the window ends, on the day it ends.

Quiet hours drop notifications. They don't save them for morning. If a task finishes at 2am inside your quiet window, you will not get a notification about it at 2am or at 8am — Plank doesn't queue it up and deliver it late. The task itself is still sitting there, finished, whenever you next open the chat; quiet hours only affects whether a push interrupts you.

"Needs your answer" is the one exception — it always comes through, quiet hours or not. A task that's blocked on a question is burning time until you answer it, in a way a finished task simply isn't. If you don't want to be woken for anything, ever, turn the Plank needs my answer toggle off entirely rather than relying on quiet hours to catch it — quiet hours won't.

Sound

One switch, Play a sound, controls whether notifications play your device's normal notification sound. Plank never bundles a custom sound or fights your ringer or Focus/Do Not Disturb settings — it always defers to those.

On Android, your system notification settings win. Android freezes a notification channel's sound the moment it's first created, so Plank creates two channels up front — one with sound, one silent — and the in-app switch simply chooses which channel a notification goes to. If you've separately muted Plank's channel in Android's own system settings, that overrides the in-app switch. This is intended: your system-level choice about an app's notifications should always be the last word, not something an in-app toggle can quietly undo.

Hiding details

By default a notification shows useful context: the chat title and either the file it produced or a short description. Turn on Hide details on the lock screen and every notification instead reads generically — "A task finished" or "A task needs your answer" — with no chat name, no filename, nothing that could be read over your shoulder or shown on a lock screen you don't control.

Turning notifications on

The first time a task runs for a while, Plank asks inline, right in the chat: "This one's taking a while. Want Plank to tell you when it's done?" Choosing Notify me is what actually raises your browser's or phone's permission dialog — Plank never asks for permission the moment you open the app, because a permission prompt on page load is the single most reflexively-denied dialog on the internet, and on the web that denial is close to permanent. This inline ask appears at most twice, ever; after that, Settings always has an Enable on this device option if you change your mind.

On Safari on macOS, web notifications need one extra step: add Plank to the Dock. Safari refuses to register for push notifications for a site that hasn't been added to the Dock as its own app. If notifications aren't working in Safari, open plank.md in Safari, then choose File → Add to Dock, and try enabling notifications again. Settings shows this same instruction if Safari reports it can't register.

On mobile, a native app update is required. If you installed Plank before this feature shipped and haven't updated since, notifications won't be available on that install until you update — this isn't something that arrives automatically in the background the way most changes do.

Tapping a notification

Tapping a notification opens that chat — the exact conversation the task ran in, not just the workspace it lives in. It works the same way whether the app was closed, in the background, or already open in front of you, and on mobile it opens the chat pane rather than the file viewer.

If the chat is in a workspace you no longer have access to, Plank tells you so on the way in rather than quietly landing you somewhere else. If the chat itself was deleted or archived, it opens and the conversation tells you it's no longer there.

Your devices

Settings → Notifications → Your devices lists every device currently registered to receive your notifications — phone, browser, whatever you've turned it on for. Remove any device you no longer use, or use Enable on this device to add the one you're on now.

What you won't get

Notifications are tap-through only — tapping one opens the chat (above), it doesn't let you reply from the notification itself. There's no email channel, and on a shared workspace chat, only the person whose turn it is gets notified — not the whole team.