Clyde

A friendly Claude Code session monitor for macOS.

Know what Claude is doing — without alt-tabbing.

Website · Download · Changelog

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Clyde is a tiny SwiftUI menu bar app that watches every Claude Code session running on your Mac and shows you, in one glance, whether they're working, ready, or need your attention.

It connects to Claude Code's native hook events, so updates are instant — no polling, no lag, no missed permission requests.

Features

• 🟢 Real-time session tracking — busy / ready / needs-input, fed by Claude Code's native hooks. No polling.
• 🔔 Attention alerts — sound and macOS notification the moment Claude asks for permission. Never miss a prompt again.
• 🗂 Multi-session view — every Claude session, every terminal, in one expandable panel. Drag to reorder, name them, click to focus the matching window.
• 📜 Activity timeline — recent prompts, permissions and session lifecycle, in plain language.
• 🎯 Menu bar capsule — dominant state at a glance, with two ticks for the other states.
• 💤 Snooze — 15 / 30 / 60 / 120 minute mute when you need quiet.
• ⌨️ Global hotkey — ⌃⌘C to expand from anywhere.
• 🛠 Self-installs the hook — Clyde adds and self-heals its hook script in ~/.claude/hooks/ so you never have to think about it.
• 🔒 Privacy-first — no telemetry, no network calls, no accounts. Everything stays on your Mac.

Install

Grab the latest .dmg from Releases, open it, drag Clyde.app into your Applications folder, and launch it.

On first run Clyde offers to install its Claude Code hook automatically — accept and you're done.

Early releases are not yet code-signed or notarized. On first launch macOS Gatekeeper will say the app is "from an unidentified developer". Right-click Clyde.app → Open → confirm in the dialog. macOS remembers the exception, so subsequent launches are clean. Signing and notarization are on the roadmap and will land in a later release.

Updates

Clyde ships with Sparkle built in for in-app auto-updates. The update channel is dormant until signed releases start publishing to the appcast — until then, grab new versions from Releases directly.

How it works

Clyde reads two things from your local file system:

• ~/.claude/ — to install its hook script and discover Claude Code's settings.
• ~/.clyde/ — where the hook script writes per-session state files that Clyde watches via FSEvents.

When you submit a prompt, Claude Code fires a UserPromptSubmit hook → the hook script writes a <sessionId>-busy marker → Clyde sees it within milliseconds and updates the UI. When Claude finishes, the Stop hook removes the marker. Permission requests fire PermissionRequest → Clyde rings a sound and shows the attention pill.

That's the entire architecture. No polling, no daemon, no privileged helpers.

Screenshots

The expanded view — every Claude session at a glance. Hero header tells you the dominant state, the list shows each session with its directory, and the activity bar at the bottom keeps a running tally.

The collapsed widget. Floats wherever you drop it. The big number is the dominant state count; the two ticks on the right show the others. Click to expand, drag to move, hide entirely if you only want the menu bar.

The menu bar item. Pixel‑accurate Clyde silhouette plus a colour capsule for the dominant state — purple = working, green = ready, blue = needs attention.

Build from source

Clyde is a single self-contained Swift Package. No Xcode project, nothing to configure.

git clone https://github.com/kl0sin/clyde.git
cd clyde
swift run Clyde

For a release build wrapped in a proper .app bundle:

scripts/release/build.sh
open build/release/Clyde.app

See docs/release-process.md for the full release pipeline (signing, notarization, DMG, appcast, GitHub Releases).

Project layout

Clyde/                  Main app source
├── App/                NSApplicationDelegate, panel + menu bar
├── Models/             Session, ClydeState, ActivityEvent
├── Services/           ProcessMonitor, AttentionMonitor, hook installer, ...
├── ViewModels/         App + session list view models
├── Views/              SwiftUI views
├── Resources/          clyde-hook.sh (the hook script that ships in the bundle)
└── Assets/             AppIcon.icns (generated by scripts/generate-icon.swift)

ClydeTests/             XCTest test target
scripts/                Build + release tooling
site/                   GitHub Pages landing page (deployed via Actions)
Casks/                  Homebrew cask formula
.github/workflows/      CI: deploy-site.yml, release.yml
docs/                   Pre-launch checklist + release process docs

Tests

swift test

The suite is hermetic — HookInstallerTests redirects every path through a throwaway temp home via AppPaths.homeOverride, so nothing under your real ~/.claude/ is ever touched. Runs deterministically across reruns on dev machines and CI alike.

Contributing

Bug reports and PRs welcome. For non-trivial changes please open an issue first so we can discuss the approach.

Support development

Clyde is free and MIT-licensed. If it's saving you time and you'd like to chip in, there are two ways:

• ❤️ Sponsor on GitHub — recurring or one-time, processed by GitHub.
• ☕ Buy me a coffee — one-off tip, no account needed.

Both are entirely optional and there's no paid tier — Clyde stays fully featured for everyone.

License

MIT — use it, fork it, sell it, do whatever.

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_{Built in SwiftUI with care by Mateusz Kłosiński.}