The bar widget

A parcel and a number, in your bar.

What the number is

How many changes are waiting for the next rebuild.

That is the whole feature, and it exists because of a gap NixOS has and package managers do not. On Arch, pacman -S ripgrep finishes and ripgrep is there; there is no in-between state to forget about. Here, picking a row edits a file and builds nothing. If you pick five things and get distracted, the machine is unchanged and nothing on screen says so — until the next time you happen to run an apply and find five surprises in it.

So the count sits in the bar. It is a reminder, and a way back into the list that made it.

What it does not do

It does not open a second copy of the menu. Clicking it summons the same menu, with the same keys, on the same card.

That is a deliberate restraint. A bar dropdown listing the queued changes would be a second interaction model to keep in step with the first, and the two would drift — one of them would learn about a new row type and the other would not. One list, two ways in.

When it is empty

It shows nothing. An empty queue is not news.

“never applied”

If the count is drawn beside never applied, this machine has a selection but has never run nixarchy-apply — so the copy of your selection that the flake actually reads does not exist yet. The first apply creates it.

That is normal on a machine that has just installed the plugin, and it means what it says: what you can see in the menu is not yet what the system is built from.