Run your desktop AI apps in separate boxes, side by side.
Different logins, different tools, all kept apart. One bento box, neat little compartments.

What is Bento?  ·  Download  ·  How it works  ·  Which apps work  ·  How it's built  ·  Development

What is Bento?

Bento lets you run desktop AI apps like Claude Desktop with more than one account at the same time. Each account gets its own box, which we call a compartment. A compartment has its own login, its own tools, and its own settings, and it never mixes with the others.

Say you use Claude for work and for personal projects. Open one compartment signed in with your work account and another with your personal account, and run them together without one ever seeing the other.

Bento sits in your menu bar (macOS) or system tray (Windows). Click the icon, pick a compartment, and its app opens on the right account. A little dot shows you what's running, and one more click stops it.

Bento is the desktop-app sibling of Soromi, which does the same thing for terminal agents. Spaces hold your terminal agents. The Bento holds your desktop apps, one compartment per account.

Download

Get the latest build from the releases page:

• macOS: the .dmg (universal — Apple Silicon and Intel)
• Windows: the .exe installer (or the .msi)

Heads up: these builds aren't signed yet. On macOS, the first time you open Bento go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click "Open Anyway" (or right-click Bento and choose Open). On Windows, SmartScreen may warn — click "More info" then "Run anyway". Signed builds are coming soon.

What you can do

• One account per box. Give each app its own login (work, personal, a client) and keep them fully apart. Run them at the same time.
• Tools stay separate too. Every compartment keeps its own settings and tools, so what you set up in one never leaks into another.
• Start and stop from the menu bar. A tidy little panel lists your compartments with a live status dot. One click to start, one to stop.
• See if an app will work. Point Bento at any app and it tells you right away whether it can keep it properly separate.
• Clean by default. Everything for a compartment lives in its own folder. Remove the compartment and its folder goes with it.
• Gentle update nudges. Bento checks for new versions and shows a small banner with a download link. Nothing ever installs on its own.

How it works

Most of these apps are built on a framework called Electron, and Electron apps let you tell them where to keep their data. Everything about a login (who you're signed in as, your session, your local settings) lives in that one folder. Give a new copy of the app a brand new folder and you get a brand new, clean login that has nothing to do with the others.

Bento starts each app directly, so it stays in charge of it: it can pass the right settings, show you accurate status, and shut the app down cleanly when you stop it. If you happened to start a copy some other way, Bento notices that too, so the status stays honest.

Everything a compartment needs lives in one place, grouped by app:

~/.soromi-bento/
  compartments.json          the list of your compartments
  claude/                    one folder per app
    work/                    a compartment's own folder, kept fully separate
    personal/

Which apps work

Right now Bento works with Electron apps on macOS and Windows. When you add a compartment, Bento checks the app for you.

App	Works?
Claude Desktop	✅ Yes
ChatGPT Desktop (Electron)	✅ Should work
Cursor / VS Code / Windsurf	✅ Yes
Older native apps (Perplexity, Copilot, old ChatGPT)	⚠️ Not supported

Some apps keep their login somewhere Bento can't separate. Bento marks those as Not compatible instead of pretending it can keep them apart.

Good to know

• Signing in with multiple boxes open. Some apps sign you in by handing off to your browser and back. With several boxes open, that hand-off can land in the wrong one. For now, sign in to one compartment at a time.
• App updates. All your boxes share one copy of the app. Letting the app update itself while several boxes are open can break it, so close them before you update.

How it's built

Bento is one small Tauri app: a Rust core with a menu-bar panel built in React and Mantine.

• The Rust core does all the real work: finding the app, starting it with its own folder and settings, tracking what's running, and stopping it cleanly. It also remembers your list of compartments.
• The menu-bar icon opens the panel right under itself when you click it. There's no dock icon, since Bento lives in the menu bar.
• The panel is a React and Mantine app, organized by feature, with a small store that talks to the Rust core.

src-tauri/src/
  launcher.rs      start an app in its own folder, check status, detect the app
  compartment.rs   what a compartment is
  store.rs         where things live on disk, and saving the list
  state.rs         the running picture: your list plus what's live
  providers.rs     the list of known apps
  updates.rs       the gentle update check
  tray.rs          the menu-bar icon and the panel toggle
  main.rs          commands, window, and app startup
src/
  app/             the panel shell
  features/        compartments, updates, layout
  lib/             typed calls into the core, and shared types
  stores/          app state

Development

You'll need Node 22 or newer, pnpm, and the Rust toolchain.

pnpm install
pnpm dev          # run the menu-bar app while you work on it (click the tray icon)
pnpm build:mac    # build the .app
pnpm typecheck    # check the frontend types

To cut a release (this bumps the version, commits, and tags, but does not push):

pnpm release <patch|minor|major|X.Y.Z>
git push && git push origin <version>   # pushing the tag kicks off the build

License

MIT