Editing and rule behavior

Technical reference · Compatibility

For setup steps, follow Room → Displays → Strip → Rules.

Setup and room editing

The setup guide remembers your step. Skip it or replay it through Settings → Replay setup guide without clearing your work. Finish saves a valid setup and hides the sidebar; it does not enable lighting. Select a top tab to edit again.

Measurements and displays

• Distances use meters (m). Both 3.75 and 3,75 work; mixed separators, nonfinite values and thousands grouping do not. Fields commit on Enter or focus loss. Display rounding to two decimal places does not round saved geometry.
• Fresh rooms import KDE displays with their aspect ratios and relative desktop arrangement. Discovery reads logical geometry—not screen content, physical distances or window positions.
• Refresh preserves saved names, placements, sizes, angles and rule destinations. Known connectors can refresh aspect ratios; new displays are offered for import. Use desktop layout explicitly rearranges detected displays; Undo restores placement.
• Display rotation snaps to 45°, including typed angles. Clear Snap to 45° or hold Shift while dragging or committing a fine adjustment.

Strip allocation and rule anchors

• Connect reads LED count, WLED version and realtime state without sending pixels or changing settings. Use a private LAN or link-local IPv4 address; the initial 127.0.0.1 is loopback for local fixtures.
• Around room / Along walls replace the route and reset allocation and direction. Starting placements only reopens the choices. Review allocation after replacing a route, adding/removing points or connecting a different LED count.
• Proportional allocation samples the path at uniform physical spacing. Dragging a numbered LED-rail handle converts it to explicit point indices without moving geometry. Endpoints stay fixed, interior indices stay ordered, and each interval is interpolated separately. Proportional reset restores uniform spacing; reversed layouts show actual device indices.
• Contextual Lift moves one point. Sidebar Whole-strip height moves every point while preserving relative heights. Inserting a bend in by-point allocation needs a free LED index between neighbouring anchors.
• Rules initially follow their assigned display. Drag the marker in either strip view or enter Position to pin it to a device LED; the display icon restores display-following. Clicking a room display changes the assignment.
• Explicit rule positions survive geometry, allocation and direction changes, and scale proportionally when LED count changes. Removing a display redirects its rules to the first remaining display.

Optional room outlines

Use Room → Room shape… for Rectangle / L-shaped starting outlines, corner/wall dragging, Across / Along measurements and Snap · 5 cm. Add corner inserts on the selected corner's outgoing edge. Done returns to the 3D view without saving or enabling lighting.

• Custom outlines have 3–12 corners, uniform height and at least 1 cm between adjacent corners. No self-intersections, overlapping edges, holes, internal partitions, multiple rooms or curved walls.
• Width/depth/height resizing scales placement proportionally and preserves LED allocation indices.
• Shape-only changes, including Rotate outline, preserve display anchors, strip points, allocation and rule anchors. Rotation stays within the existing width/depth box. Nothing automatically fits to new walls.
• Display containment checks its floor anchor. Every complete strip span must stay inside the footprint. Correct red conflicts by moving objects, adding a bend, reshaping the outline or using Undo.
• Invalid drafts pause output and cannot overwrite a valid save. A valid same-device correction can resume already-enabled output; missed notifications are discarded. Disable lighting for local-only editing.

The drawing is a routing map, not physical calibration or a simulation of wall occlusion and light propagation. See validation limits for sizes and counts.

Rules, effects and palettes

Match an application

Matching is exact and ASCII case-insensitive. The canonical desktop-entry prefix takes precedence over the app name; legitimate suffixes remain significant. Choose an observed source in Add app when a launcher name differs. All other apps is the * fallback; an explicit disabled or trigger-filtered rule suppresses fallback for that app.

Choose an effect

• One-off: finite duration; selecting it enables fading. Glow gives a centered signal and Ripple adds one outward band. A coalesced one-off notification extends movement without restarting the band. Effects never repeat or strobe.
• Persistent: remains until the desktop explicitly dismisses/closes it or you dismiss its light. Popup timeout is not dismissal. Persistent ripple enters once over a steady marker; independent notification IDs remain independently dismissible.
• Dismiss: scene control clears the selected rule's persistent lights; the toolbar counter clears all. Neither dismisses desktop notifications.
• Room range uses 3D distance from the anchor LED; LEDs uses device-index steps. Both extend on either side of the anchor.
• Gradient: two to eight stops from center to outer range. Endpoints stay at 0% and 100%; intermediate stops move or can be removed. Glow and ripple share the palette; critical emphasis applies after interpolation.
• Steady light: choose One-off → Glow and clear Fade in and out, or enable Reduced motion. Reduced motion replaces fades/ripples with steady indications without changing lifetime. Media markers stay steady.

Overlapping notifications, gradients and media add RGB contributions before a shared per-LED brightness limit that preserves hue ratios. Red and blue can mix toward magenta; removing one leaves the other.

Notification state

At most 32 notification records are active. If all are persistent, new notifications are ignored until one is dismissed.

Persistent lights are session-local and require a matching notification-daemon reply. They can resume after temporary lock/quiet inhibition; events received while inhibited are discarded. Lost lifecycle observation, daemon restart, output failure, device changes, guidance or changes to lighting enablement clear active records. Restarting LedAlert does not restore them.

Taskbar examples and application icons

Rules → Examples reads Plasma's pinned launchers and desktop-entry metadata. Communication/productivity apps start selected; other pins can be included. Suggestions do not guarantee that an app emits desktop notifications.

• Try examples cycles locally, names the current app in the status bar, and neither adds rules nor sends pixels.
• Add selected adds only missing explicit rules in one undoable edit, preserving existing rules and fallback. Choose their initial display, then refine each marker.
• Examples last three seconds without media or critical emphasis. New rules use the icon's dominant color, ignoring transparent padding, or a category color. Saved colors are never replaced.
• Suggestions do not launch apps, execute launcher commands, scan history or read notification content. Unsupported launchers are skipped.

Artwork resolves through local icon themes and inheritance, using local PNG or self-contained SVG. Loading runs off the GUI thread. Missing or rejected artwork leaves a text-only tile; Add app uses the same metadata.

Settings → Hide demo content hides examples and stops their playback. Hide tooltips disables hover explanations, not accessible button names. Both preferences survive restart.

Identity, motion and keyboard controls

The original pixel-alert mascot and coral/cyan wordmark belong to LedAlert's visual identity. WLED is an integration target and inspiration, not the author or endorser of these assets. The vector mark has a bundled PNG companion for the native window. The Silkscreen font has its own SIL Open Font License; this does not license LedAlert itself.

Settings → Reduced motion freezes decorative movement and takes precedence over notification fading and ripples.

Undo never grants hardware permission or restores quiet/lock state or notification history. Same-device undo/redo preserves current enablement and connection; changing the target disarms output. Undo/redo always ends guidance.