— Docs

Your first slot.

One slot, end to end. We'll bind an empty position on the ring to a system action, fire it from the desk, and you'll be ready to fill the rest of the menu.

Open the editor

Click the Circa icon in the menu bar and pick Settings…, then open the Customization tab. The editor shows a live preview of the menu on the left and the slot inspector on the right; the inspector is empty until you select a slot.

On a clean install the ring already has a small starter set so the menu is immediately usable. The walkthrough below adds one more slot to it; if you would rather start from scratch, remove the seeded slots first using the − button on each.

Add a slot

Click any empty position on the ring. A picker appears with one card per slot kind. The inspector fills in with the fields for the kind you choose.

Pick a kind

For this walkthrough, pick System action. Other kinds — App, Keystroke, Script, Snippet, Dynamic, Cycling, Group, Profile switcher, Mode switch — work the same way once you know one of them. See the slot kinds rundown for what each one does.

Bind an action

The System action inspector shows a search field and a catalogue of every action Circa ships with — lock screen, Do Not Disturb, volume, brightness, dark mode, mission control, screenshot, and so on.

Pick Lock screen. There's nothing else to configure — system actions don't take parameters beyond the few that do (e.g. Set Volume takes a percentage).

Choose an icon

Click the icon well at the top of the inspector. Circa offers three sources: SF Symbols, your system emoji picker, and the icon of any installed app. Pick anything; you can change it any time.

Try it

Close Settings. Trigger your activation binding on the desktop. The menu appears with your new slot filled in. Move the cursor over the slot and click. The screen locks.

That is the entire interaction loop. Every slot in Circa — every app, script, snippet, keystroke, dynamic label — fires the same way.

Common first slots

A starter ring people tend to build in the first five minutes:

12  Open Notes
 2  Toggle Do Not Disturb
 4  Type my email address
 6  Lock screen
 8  Window: left half
10  Window: right half

Three are system actions, one is a snippet, two are keystrokes routed to your window manager of choice. Nothing exotic — but six slots is already more shortcuts than most people remember in any one app.

Where next

Profiles — save several menus and switch between them, or have Figma and Xcode get their own slots automatically.