A Herdr companion in the menu bar
See every coding agent at a glance. Jump to the one that needs you. No polling. No new panes.
| 👁 Menu-bar glance | ⚡ Event-driven | 🎯 Priority focus |
|---|---|---|
| Done and Working stay on the extra. Blocked and Unknown join when they need you. Idle lives behind the dashboard eye. | events.subscribe invalidates the snapshot; agent.list refreshes it. Never poll Herdr on a timer. |
Option-click jumps to the highest-priority agent — blocked, then done, working, unknown, idle. |
| 🪟 Focus, never create | 🧩 Every live session | 🎨 Claude Code palette |
agent.focus, then tab.focus so the attached TUI follows, then raise that session’s host terminal. Never open a window, pane, or agent. |
Discover default and named sessions (work, …) and identify agents as (sessionName, pane_id). |
Defaults match Claude’s terminal tabs; working uses the CLI spinner terracotta. Override from the gear. |
What this is
herdr-bar is the macOS menu-bar companion for Herdr. It talks to Herdr’s Unix sockets, folds every live session into a glanceable count, and jumps you back to a pane that already exists.
Requires Herdr 0.8+ and macOS 13+. The app is an
LSUIElement— it never appears in the Dock.
Herdr owns the agents. The terminal owns the TUI. herdr-bar is the glance in between — it never starts Herdr and never creates a pane.
flowchart LR
subgraph host [Your Mac]
TUI["Terminal<br/>herdr TUI"]
Extra["herdr-bar<br/>menu extra"]
Widget["Desktop widget<br/>read-only list"]
end
Herdr["herdr server<br/>herdr.sock"]
TUI -->|"attach / session attach"| Herdr
Extra -->|"events.subscribe<br/>agent.list"| Herdr
Extra -->|"agent.focus then<br/>tab.focus / pane.focus"| Herdr
Extra -->|"raise host"| TUI
Extra -->|"widget-snapshot.json"| Widget
Widget -->|"herdr-bar://focus"| Extra
Without it you attach each session and hunt for the pane that needs you. With it: Option-click the extra for the highest-priority agent, or open the dashboard and click a row.
What is herdr-bar?
A macOS menu-bar extra for Herdr. It does not start Herdr. It discovers herdr.sock, shows Done / Working counts, and Option-click focuses the highest-priority agent.
How do I install it?
Download a tagged HerdrBar-*-macos.zip from GitHub Releases, or ./scripts/install.sh from source. The zip is ad-hoc signed — first launch may need right-click → Open. Details: Install.
Does it create new panes?
No. Focus is agent.focus, then tab.focus / pane.focus so the attached TUI follows, then raising the host terminal. See Usage and Architecture.