I kept missing Claude Code's permission prompts, so I moved them into the Mac notch

MF DEV — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:24:20 +0000

Most days I have four or five coding agents running at once: a couple of Claude Code sessions, a Codex session, sometimes something in the background. And most days I lose time the same way. One of them stops to ask "can I run this command?", its terminal is buried under three other windows, and it sits there waiting while I assume it's still working.

Notifications didn't help much. They tell me something needs me, but I still have to find the right terminal, read the request and type an answer.

So I built Openbar, a free, open-source Mac app that puts every agent session on my machine into the notch.

What it does

When a session needs you, the notch opens into an island with the request in full. You see the whole command or the file diff and pick Allow, Deny or Always. ⌘Y, ⌘N and ⌘T work from any app, so I usually answer without leaving my editor.

If the agent asks a question with options, you pick one (or several, or write your own) in the same place.

You can also type or speak a reply, and it lands in that session's own terminal or editor. Speech recognition runs on the Mac.

You can enlarge a session to read the conversation as it grows, with its tools, tasks, cost and model. Subagents get their own rows, background ones included.

Every session also gets a small pixel Clawd in a random costume. I added that for fun and ended up liking it more than I expected.

Which agents

Agent	In the list	Approve in the island	Reply from the island
Claude Code	✓	✓	✓
Codex	✓	✓	✓
OpenCode	✓	✓	✓
Gemini CLI	✓	in Gemini CLI	✓
Copilot CLI	✓	in Copilot CLI	✓
Cursor	✓	in Cursor	`cursor-agent` only

Sessions show up whatever terminal they run in, and replies reach Terminal, iTerm2, Ghostty, tmux, WezTerm and kitty.

What changed for me

I stopped checking terminals just in case. If the notch is quiet, nothing needs me. When something does, I read the exact command, decide, and go back to what I was doing.

I also read diffs more carefully now. A diff in a small focused card is much easier to actually read than one scrolling past in a terminal.

The rest of it

Openbar started as a menu bar toolkit, and that part is still there if you want it: a volume mixer, system monitor, clipboard history, window layouts, keep awake, Now Playing and a few more. Each one is a switch in the Features hub, so you only turn on what you use.

There's also a Windows 11 beta with the same sessions island.

Try it

It runs on macOS 14 or later (native Swift), plus the Windows 11 beta. It's free and GPL-3.0.

github.com/MF-DEEV/Openbar