liquid sidebar

A collapsible app sidebar whose dark panel behaves like liquid, on a soft, blurred app canvas. On load the collapsed rail is an invisible vessel: a thin stream pours in from above, splashes and fills it with sloshing waves and rising bubbles, then the icons pop in. Collapse or expand it (the toggle row, the button under the stage or the [ key) and the right edge flows as a wave from the toggle; droplets break off ahead of it and merge back, and the labels slide in once the liquid settles, with an unread badge that grows from a dot on the icon into a pill beside its label. Move the cursor near the edge and it reaches towards it and ripples; on phones a sideways drag does the same. The panel is a ring of spring-coupled boundary nodes with a surface-wave layer (with a surface-tension term) along its free edge, drawn as SVG with a goo filter. It runs in fixed physics steps with seeded random numbers, so it moves the same at 60, 120 or 144 Hz. Under the stage: replay the intro, toggle, slow motion (1×, 0.5×, 0.25×) and a liquidity slider from thick and calm to runny and splashy. Follows the system's light or dark mode; reduced motion shows the panel at rest.