Quote
A small daily nudge. A curated list of twelve, with category filters and an optional auto-rotate timer.
Twelve hand-picked quotes across engineering, philosophy, and productivity — that's the whole pool, kept short on purpose. Pick a new one with the refresh icon, let auto-rotate do it for you, or filter to a single category for a more consistent tone of voice.
“Make it work, make it right, make it fast.”
— Kent Beck
Add it to your dashboard
Press E , then A , pick Quote. Drops in at four-wide, two-tall — a quiet sidebar tile. The text is set in a serif italic with a soft pull-quote mark in the corner; it's meant to sit in your peripheral vision, not demand attention.
Click the small refresh icon at the bottom-right to pick a new quote from your current category filter. The choice is saved — close the tab, come back, the same quote is waiting unless auto-rotate has moved on.
The pool
The quote list is hardcoded inside the widget, twelve entries, no network. Splits roughly evenly across the three categories:
- Engineering — Knuth on premature optimization, Abelson on programs being for humans, that sort of thing.
- Philosophy — Da Vinci, Robert Frost, Steve Jobs. Quieter, more general-purpose.
- Productivity — Kent Beck's "make it work, make it right, make it fast," Sheryl Sandberg's "done is better than perfect."
The list is deliberately small. A 5,000-quote pool turns into wallpaper; twelve makes you actually notice the one you landed on this morning.
Settings
| Setting | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Categories Engineering, Philosophy, Productivity — toggle on the ones you want in rotation. None checked = show quotes from every category, never silently blank. | multi-toggle | none (= all) |
| Auto-rotate (minutes) Set to e.g. 30 to swap the quote automatically every thirty minutes. Auto-rotated quotes are not persisted — only the one you manually picked sticks across reloads, so you don't end up with a stale "rotation index" written every minute. | integer | 0 (off) |
| Show author Toggle off if you prefer the quote to stand alone, without the small — Author Name attribution line. | toggle | on |
Small things you might miss
- Filtering never blanks the widget. If you toggle every category off, the widget treats that as "show all" rather than "show none." Same outcome as having all three toggled on — saves you a tiny gotcha.
- Auto-rotate doesn't repeat itself. Each rotation picks a different quote than the current one. With twelve in the pool you'll see the same quote again eventually, but not back-to-back.
- Manual picks persist; auto picks don't. Clicking the refresh icon writes the new index to storage. Auto-rotate only updates local state — so we're not hammering Chrome's sync with a new index every minute. Reload during an auto-rotated session and you'll land on the last manually-picked quote, not whatever happened to be on screen.
Heads up
- No custom-quote list yet. The pool is twelve fixed entries today — if you want your own collection, that's on the list for a future update. Track it on the What's new page.
- The pool is in English. All twelve quotes are English originals or commonly cited English translations. No localised versions yet.