A short one. Every widget nextDash had read something it already held on your own disk: your links, your checks, your inbox. 1.7.0 adds the first two that look outward instead – at the weather, and at what is coming up in your calendar – along with a layout you can lock and a round of buttons that had stopped matching the themes around them.
Source and downloads: github.com/jordibrouwer/nextdash
Release notes: v1.7.0 on GitHub
Two widgets that look outward
Nineteen widget types now, in a new group of their own in the catalogue: What is happening around you?
Weather puts current conditions beside a forecast – three days, five days, or the next 24 hours. It does not ask you where you are, because you have already said: it reads the location, source and units you set for the header’s own weather line. Asking a second time would have been a second answer to keep in step with the first. It polls on the same half-hourly cadence as that line rather than inventing a schedule of its own.
Calendar shows what is coming up, from one ICS feed set once for the whole install under Behavior → Date & weather → Calendar feed URL. The fetching and parsing happen on the server rather than in your browser, for the same reason the Custom widget works that way: most providers hand out a private feed address that is not meant for cross-origin JavaScript, and it is not a thing to leave sitting in a script anyone can read. One cached copy of the feed is shared by every calendar tile, each narrowing it to its own look-ahead and row count.
One deliberate limit worth stating plainly: a recurring event shows the occurrence its feed states, not an expanded series. Expanding recurrence rules properly is a considerable amount of calendar arithmetic, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it – a tile that quietly puts your standup on the wrong day is worse than one that says less.
If you already keep an outbound calendar link in the header, note that Calendar URL and Calendar feed URL are two different fields: the first is where the button sends you, the second is what the widget reads.
A layout you can lock
Config → Behavior → General → Lock layout, or :lock-layout from the command palette. It turns off drag-and-drop reordering, both for bookmarks inside a category and for categories on the grid.
It gates the drag gesture and nothing else – sorting, adding, renaming and deleting all carry on as before. This is for a dashboard that has settled: the arrangement is right, and every remaining drag is an accident on a trackpad. It reuses the hint the sort-locked case already shows rather than growing a second way of telling you the same thing.
Buttons that stopped fighting the theme
The icon-only buttons were drawn as small bordered boxes, which was fine when there was one look to match. With depth, glass and derived glow in the picture, a hard-bordered rectangle sitting on a translucent panel reads as something the theme forgot about.
The new look is not a per-theme override – it would be 222 of them. The colours are computed from the same formula the hairlines already use, so every theme gets it without declaring anything. Full-word buttons are untouched: Quickstart, the page tabs, the Settings and Delete rows all still look like buttons with words in them, because that is what they are.
And two smaller things
A typed setting command shows you what it is currently set to. Every toggle and every multi-choice command in the palette – :density, :columns, :theme and the rest – now tints its current row and marks it with a small pill, rather than relying on the word “(current)” in the row text. The list redraws in place after you choose, so the marker moves with it.
Hypr mode has its own section in config, under Onboarding, with an actual explanation. It had been sitting in the general checkbox list directly beneath “Open links in a new tab”, which is a good way to have people toggle the wrong one.
If you skipped the last two
Two small releases were held back from the What’s new window so they would not push the last big one aside. They are ordinary entries again now, so scrolling back no longer skips a version. Between them they fixed an open row menu in Health being drawn behind the row below it, cut in half, and being painted underneath the sticky header – both only visible under a depth theme, which is exactly the kind of bug that survives a review because it does not reproduce on the theme you happen to be running.
Upgrading
docker compose pull
docker compose up -dNothing needs migrating, and nothing changes on your screen unless you go looking. The two new widgets have to be added before they do anything, and Lock layout is off until you switch it on. If you want the calendar tile, the feed URL is the one thing to set first – the widget has nothing to read until it exists.
Source and downloads: github.com/jordibrouwer/nextdash
Previously: A theme is more than a palette, and two views stopped being drawn twice
