Tiny
The orb and a status dot. Enough to know a session exists and whether it is talking.
A sphere, a name, and one line of status.
NovaHUD is deliberately small on screen. Below is the interface it actually puts over your desktop — the card, the four sizes, the eight session colours and the three modes.
These are re-creations, not photographs
Everything on this page is drawn in the browser with the same colours, proportions and layers the app uses, so that the page needs no remote images and no tracking. It is a faithful likeness of the interface rather than a screen capture of it. The real thing floats over your own windows, at your own scale.
The card
One per Claude Code session, permanently bound to it, floating above every other window — including the Claude Code app itself.
Four parts, and no more
Every card carries the session's orb, its name, the mode it is in with the colour it answers to, and a status. The last line is whatever it is doing right now — the phrase it is speaking, the summary it just gave, or nothing at all.
A card belongs to exactly one session for as long as that session exists. It never silently re-points at another one, so the card you are looking at is always the session you think it is. Drag it where it suits you and it stays there.
Dimmed cards above are idle. In the app they sit quietly at whatever opacity you left them at until their session has something to say.
Four sizes, not four zoom levels
Smaller cards drop information rather than shrinking the text, so a tiny card is still legible at a glance. You choose the size new cards start at.
Small
Adds the session's name, so you can tell two orbs of similar colour apart without hovering.
Medium
Name, mode and colour, plus the live status line.
Large
The full status line and every control the card has.
Identity
Eight colours, and they are how you talk to it
A session's colour is not decoration. It is an address: "blue orb, are you there?" reaches the session wearing blue. Each colour is assigned once, when a card is first opened, and is kept — it does not reshuffle when you close a card.
Each session also gets its own human voice, so two sessions speaking are distinguishable by ear as well as by eye.
Blue
Gold
Teal
Violet
Coral
Green
Rose
Amber
Nova's own orb — the one at the top of the home page — is deliberately not one of these eight. It is iridescent because it answers for all of them, and keeping it out of the set means "blue orb" never becomes ambiguous.
What you hear, per session
Mode is set per card, because different sessions deserve different amounts of your attention.
Read aloudSpeaks the session's output in full, in that session's voice
SummarySpeaks the bottom line, attributed by session name
QuietSays nothing, still delivers everything you send
Any modeTalk over it and it stops instantly
The honest way to see it is to run it.
Three days, every feature, no card. macOS 14 or later on an Apple silicon Mac.