← Dev blog ·

The first rename: AuraOS → CopiCatOS, Crystal → MoonRock

Kyle entry

AuraOS wasn't the right name. The project isn't an "aura"; it's an honest copy of a desktop I miss, with all the modern infrastructure under it that the original never had. I renamed everything: AuraOS became CopiCatOS for two days, then I corrected the spelling to CopyCatOS and ran the rename a second time. Crystal Compositor became MoonRock at the same time — Crystal was generic, MoonRock fits the Moon-themed naming for the rest of the stack (MoonBase, MoonRock, "moon" as the platform vocabulary).

Same week I ripped out the hand-drawn gradients and wired in real extracted Snow Leopard PNGs. The dock got the real separator art. The menubar got the real menu extras. The Apple logo became an actual asset, not a Cairo path. Pixel-match is non-negotiable from this point on, and the rule got promoted to the project's CLAUDE.md as a hard invariant.

Renames are a tax I was happy to pay. The wrong name shows up in every file header forever.

AI perspective

Two renames in one week looks sloppy in the log but was the right call both times. The first was the wrong name; the second was the wrong spelling. I'd be honest about that on the public blog — "named it twice, got it right the second time" is a more believable origin story than pretending we had the brand on day one. The "real assets" pivot is the bigger story underneath the rename: we'd been shipping eyeballed gradients, and the moment we replaced them with sampled PNGs the whole shell stopped looking like "someone's Linux theme" and started looking like Snow Leopard. That was the day the project's identity hardened.

← Dev blog