Perch
Using PerchWhat Perch is

What Perch is

A notch overlay for Linux and Windows — music, calls, volume, and your widgets in one smooth black pill at the top of your screen.

2 min readUpdated Jul 21, 2026

Perch™ puts a Dynamic Island-style notch at the top-center of your screen. It composes whatever is happening right now — the music you’re playing, the Discord call you’re in, the volume you just changed — into one black pill, and every change glides. Nothing pops, nothing jumps.

Two modes

You pick how the notch lives on your screen, and you can switch anytime in Settings.

ModeBehavior
StaticAlways perched top-center, showing the pair of widgets you chose.
DynamicHidden until something happens — drops down, does its job, retracts.

In both modes, hovering the notch (or the spot where it would be) expands it into pages of widgets — media controls, weather, clocks, system stats, notes, launchers — arranged however you like.

What lives in the notch

Contexts compose. Media playing shows album art and a live visualizer. A Discord call shows who’s talking with a green speaking ring. Both at once? The notch reshapes — avatars cap at three and relocate so the music stays readable. Volume, brightness, battery, and downloads are transients: they widen the notch for a few seconds, then leave it exactly as it was.

Free when idle

Perch is built to run 24/7 on gaming machines, so idle cost is a design constraint, not an optimization. The overlay repaints only on change — when nothing moves, CPU and GPU cost approach zero, and it never taxes your frame rate in games.


Ready? Install Perch — it takes about two minutes.

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