Notifications

Birch signals through several channels: desktop notifications, an OS sound, the dock/taskbar badge, in-app toasts, and — for teams — Microsoft Teams cards via an incoming webhook. Each has its own toggle, so you can tune Birch anywhere between silent and fully wired.

Note

There is no dedicated Notifications pane. The Inbox and Teams toggles live in Settings → AI (⌘, / Ctrl+,), and the break-start notification lives in Settings → Health.

Desktop notifications

The toggle is Show a desktop notification for new inbox items (Settings → AI, Inbox section; on by default). Its own help text is the contract: an OS notification appears when a new task, review-requested PR, or activity on one of your PRs arrives; clicking it opens the Inbox. The set of items already present at startup never notifies — only genuinely new arrivals do.

The same toggle also gates the agent-waiting toast: when an agent in a workspace stops and waits for your input, Birch raises a desktop notification (e.g. Claude is waiting, with the branch and message); clicking it takes you to that workspace.

A third desktop notification — a Health break starting — has its own toggle in the Health pane and deliberately carries no click target (focusing a window that’s about to be covered would be hostile). See Health breaks.

Sound

Play a sound when a new inbox item arrives (on by default) plays the system notification sound when a new task, PR, PR activity, or agent item appears in the Inbox. As with desktop notifications, the set present at startup never sounds.

App-icon badge

Show the inbox count on the app icon (on by default) shows the number of Inbox items as a badge on the macOS Dock icon or as a Windows taskbar overlay. Turning it off clears the badge immediately.

In-app toasts

Birch also shows transient toasts inside its own window for immediate feedback on actions and events. These are part of the UI rather than a notification channel, and have no separate toggle.

Microsoft Teams

The Teams notifications section (Settings → AI) posts cards to a channel through a Microsoft Teams Incoming Webhook. Paste the webhook URL into Teams webhook URL — configure one via your channel → Connectors → Incoming Webhook — and leave it empty to disable Teams entirely.

Four event toggles, all off by default:

Toggle	Fires when
Send Teams notification when review completes or fails	An AI code review finishes, successfully or not
Notify when someone approves my PR	Your PR is approved
Notify when someone reviews / requests changes on my PR	Your PR gets a review or a changes-requested verdict
Notify when someone comments on my PR	Your PR gets a comment

PR activity is batched: each background sync sends at most one card per PR, rather than one card per individual event — a burst of comments arrives as a single summary card.

A focus-mode recipe

To keep working with minimal interruption while still catching what matters:

1. Turn off the sound and desktop-notification toggles (Settings → AI, Inbox section).
2. Leave the app-icon badge on — a silent count you check on your own schedule.
3. Leave Teams toggles off (they already default off) unless your team relies on the channel.

You still see everything: new items collect in the Inbox, workspace rows keep their live agent-status glyphs, and in-app toasts confirm your own actions. Nothing pops over other apps until you opt back in.

All toggle keys and defaults are listed in the settings reference.