CCBar - Claude Code Menu Bar App

A macOS menu bar app for monitoring everything you have running across terminal tabs, Claude Code sessions, local dev servers, git worktrees, and your GitHub PRs — grouped by the project folder you're working in.

Designed for the kind of day where you have a dozen Claude Code sessions in flight across several repos and want one place to see which ones need your input, what services are running, and whether your PRs are green.

Features

• Terminal tabs — every open tab across Terminal.app / iTerm2 / Ghostty / Warp / Alacritty / kitty / WezTerm, with the foreground process and a state dot (🟠 waiting · 🟢 running · ⚪ idle).
• Claude Code sessions — the row title shows the session's aiTitle / most recent prompt, sourced from ~/.claude/projects/<dir>/<session>.jsonl. Each running claude process is paired to its own session via process start time + .jsonl birth time.
• Idle-session notifications — fires a macOS notification when a Claude session has been waiting on input for >10 minutes.
• Local services — every TCP port your user is listening on, with click-to-open in the browser for HTTP-ish ports and copy-to-clipboard for databases and other non-HTTP services.
• Git worktrees — auto-discovered from open tabs. Shows dirty file count, commits ahead / behind upstream, no-upstream warnings.
• GitHub (via the gh CLI):
  • PRs requesting your review
  • Your open PRs with CI / approval / mergeable / draft state
  • Failed Action runs (latest run per workflow/branch only — historical failures that have since been re-run successfully don't show)
  • Open Dependabot alerts (severity-sorted)
  • Notifications on new CI failures, ready-to-merge transitions, and new failed Action runs.
• Folder-first grouping — everything (tabs, services, worktrees, PRs, failed runs, alerts) lives under the project folder it relates to. Folders with attention-needing tabs sort to the top. Orphan services/worktrees collapse into a single "Other" group at the bottom.
• Click-to-focus — clicking a tab row brings that terminal tab to the front (Terminal.app / iTerm2 by exact tab; others by app activation). Clicking a service opens it; clicking a worktree opens Finder; clicking a PR opens GitHub.

Requirements

• macOS Sonoma 14.6 or later
• Apple Command Line Tools (provides swiftc)
• gh CLI authenticated (gh auth login) — only required for the GitHub features; everything else works without it.

Build & install

cd ~/Documents/team/CCBar
make install          # builds + copies CCBar.app to ~/Applications
open ~/Applications/CCBar.app

Then click the menu bar icon → check Launch at login at the bottom of the popover. CCBar will now start on every boot.

Available make targets:

Target	What it does
make build	Compile binary into build/CCBar
make app	Bundle into build/CCBar.app
make run	Build app + run it from build/ (Ctrl-C to quit)
make install	Copy bundle to ~/Applications/CCBar.app
make clean	Delete build/

Important note about launch-at-login

SMAppService registers the exact path of the app at the moment you toggle the checkbox. Always toggle launch-at-login from the installed ~/Applications/CCBar.app, never from the dev build/CCBar.app (which gets overwritten by make app). If you rebuild and reinstall, toggle the checkbox off and back on once to refresh the registration.

First-launch permissions

You'll see two macOS prompts the first time:

1. Notifications — needed for idle-session and CI-failure alerts. Allow.
2. Automation: Terminal / iTerm — first time you click a tab row, macOS asks if CCBar can control Terminal.app (or iTerm2) to focus a specific tab. Allow. Without this, CCBar can still bring the app to the front but won't switch to the right tab.

If you skipped the prompts, fix them in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Notifications / Automation.

What you'll see

A typical popover when you have several Claude sessions running:

CCBar                                                    13 tabs

sampleapps (5)
  🟠 Build OCR document chat app — claude              ttys007
  🟠 Build sample app with GenBlaze SDK — claude       ttys008
  🟢 /loop continue gmi rerun — claude                  ttys012
  🌐 :3000  vite                                        ↗
  ⎇ main          ●3 ↑1
  👁 #4   chore(deps): bump the actions group...       4d
  ⤴ ✓ ✅ #200    Fix sync regression
  ❌ CI on main                                          2h
  🛡 HIGH    lodash    Prototype pollution

genblaze (2)
  🟠 Plan fixes for genblaze DX feedback — claude      ttys001
  ⎇ main          ●12  ↑3 ↓1

CCBar (1)
  🟠 make                                                ttys010

▶ Other (3)            ← collapsed, click to expand

☐ Launch at login                                       Quit

Menu bar icon: outline terminal when nothing needs attention; filled terminal.fill plus a count when ≥1 tab is waiting for input.

How it works

CCBar is a SwiftUI MenuBarExtra accessory app (no Dock icon, no menu bar top menu). All polling happens off the main thread; the UI re-renders when published state updates.

Refresh cadences:

• 5s: terminal tabs (ps), local services (lsof), Claude sessions (file watcher on ~/.claude/projects/)
• 20s: git worktrees (git worktree list, status --porcelain, rev-list)
• 60s: GitHub data (single GraphQL query for PRs/reviews + per-repo REST for Actions runs and Dependabot alerts)
• on popover open: an immediate refresh fires so closed tabs disappear promptly when you click the icon

The codebase is small and grouped by responsibility:

File	What it does
CCBarApp.swift	App entry, AppState, MenuView, all row components
PowerAssertion.swift	Wraps IOPMAssertionCreateWithName for keep-awake
TabScanner.swift	ps + lsof → terminal tabs with cwd + foreground
LocalServicesScanner.swift	lsof listening sockets + cwds
ClaudeSessionScanner.swift	Parses .jsonl head/tail for cwd + title + state
WorktreeScanner.swift	git worktree list + dirty / ahead / behind
GitHubScanner.swift	gh api graphql + REST for Actions and Dependabot
GitHubMonitor.swift	Notifications on CI fail / ready-to-merge transitions
IdleNotifier.swift	Notifications for Claude sessions idle >10m
TabFocuser.swift	AppleScript to focus a specific Terminal/iTerm tab
MenuDismisser.swift	Close the popover after a row click

Tab → session pairing

Multiple claude processes can run in the same project folder. Each writes to its own <sessionId>.jsonl but doesn't keep the file open continuously (so lsof can't catch it) and doesn't expose the session id in args/env. We pair each tab to a session by:

1. For each claude process in cwd X, get its start time from ps etime=
2. For each .jsonl in ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-X>/, get its birth time
3. Sort tabs ascending by start time, sessions ascending by birth time
4. Greedy 1:1: each tab pairs to the earliest unclaimed session whose birth time is ≥ the tab's start time (5-minute slack accommodates Claude's first-write delay)

This holds up well in practice — Claude creates the session file a few seconds after the process starts, so the orderings line up.

Tradeoffs and known limits

• Lid-close sleep still happens regardless of CCBar — that's enforced below user-space and we can't override it without entitlements. The keep-awake assertion only blocks idle-sleep (display + system).
• Process start time vs. session birth time pairing is a heuristic. It holds for >99% of normal use; if you --resume a stale session, the pairing may be off (the new process gets paired to a fresh-but-empty session file instead of the resumed one).
• No auto-fetch for git ahead/behind. The counts reflect what's in your local refs; run git fetch yourself for fresh remote info.
• mergeStateStatus is not in gh search prs, so we use mergeable (CONFLICTING / MERGEABLE / UNKNOWN). "Behind required base" type blocks aren't detected.
• iTerm2 / Terminal AppleScript permission is opt-in. If you decline, click-to-focus falls back to bringing the app forward without selecting the specific tab.

Troubleshooting

"GitHub: not authenticated" banner. Run gh auth login in any terminal. GitHub data updates within 60s of authenticating.

Menu bar icon never updates. The reactive icon needs the AppState to be publishing; if you see a static terminal icon and the popover shows tabs but no count, file an issue. (Workaround: quit and relaunch.)

Tab title shows "ttysNNN — claude" instead of the session title. Either no .jsonl was found in the matching project dir (e.g., the cwd's first write hasn't happened yet) or all session files in that dir have birth times older than the process's start time. Usually self-resolves once the session writes once.

App crashes on launch on Sonoma 14.6+. Almost always a missing ad-hoc code signature or LaunchServices registration — symptoms include the app showing in Activity Monitor for ~1 second then disappearing, with a crash log mentioning +[UNUserNotificationCenter currentNotificationCenter]_block_invoke and bundleProxyForCurrentProcess. Fix by rebuilding cleanly with the current Makefile, which adds codesign --sign - (ad-hoc signature) and lsregister -f (LaunchServices registration):

make clean
rm -rf ~/Applications/CCBar.app
make install
open ~/Applications/CCBar.app

If you previously installed an unsigned version, also clear quarantine on the new copy: xattr -cr ~/Applications/CCBar.app.

Keep-awake doesn't work. Verify the assertion is held:

pmset -g assertions | grep CCBar

You should see a PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep line. Closing the laptop lid still sleeps the Mac regardless — that's enforced at a layer below user-space and no app can override it without special entitlements.