SwarmBar 0.1.3

Clicking a notification now goes somewhere

It did nothing at all before: SwarmBar posted notifications without installing a delegate, so macOS had nowhere to deliver the tap. A click now jumps to the terminal tab running that session, resolved by its tty, so it finds the right tab wherever you have moved it.

Banners also appear while SwarmBar is frontmost. It has no windows, so "frontmost" told you nothing, and the old behaviour suppressed alerts exactly when the popover was open.

The popover says when macOS is blocking alerts

If notifications are refused, the switches in Settings promise something that cannot happen. The popover now says so, with a button to the right settings page. It appears only when at least one notify switch is on, and it can be dismissed.

Open in Terminal prefers iTerm2

When a session has no live process there is no tab to focus, so SwarmBar opens the project directory in a new window. That path hardcoded Terminal.app, which is not where any of this app's other terminal features work.

Install

Download SwarmBar-0.1.3.dmg, drag SwarmBar to /Applications, launch it. Or, if you are on 0.1.2, just use Check for updates.

Requires macOS 26 or later.

SwarmBar 0.1.2

SwarmBar now updates itself.

Previously Check for updates found a new version and then handed you a link, so every update meant a manual download, unzip and drag. It now downloads, verifies, installs and relaunches, and it also checks quietly in the background so you hear about a release without going looking.

This adds the project's first and only third-party package, Sparkle. Self-updating fetches a file over the network and replaces the running app with it, and the signature check that makes that safe is the last thing worth hand-rolling. Nothing else in SwarmBar talks to anyone.

Install

Download SwarmBar-0.1.2.dmg, drag SwarmBar to /Applications, launch it. Signed with a Developer ID and notarized. This is the last update you have to install by hand.

Requires macOS 26 or later.

SwarmBar 0.1.1

Three fixes, all of them things that were failing quietly.

The app had no icon

No CFBundleIconFile, no .icns. Every context that wanted an icon drew a blank square: notifications, System Settings, Force Quit. Being a menu bar app with no Dock tile hid it.

Notifications never worked

macOS was refusing authorization on every attempt, and the error was being discarded, so all three switches in Settings could sit on while every alert was dropped. Authorization is now requested at launch rather than at the arbitrary moment an agent first needs you, and a refusal is reported instead of thrown away.

Settings could not tell you any of that

If macOS is blocking notifications, the popover now says so, with a button to the right settings page. It appears only when at least one notify switch is on, since nothing is broken if you have turned them all off, and it can be dismissed.

Install

Download SwarmBar-0.1.1.dmg, drag SwarmBar to /Applications, launch it. Signed with a Developer ID and notarized, so there is no Gatekeeper warning. Look for the hexagon in the menu bar.

Requires macOS 26 or later. iTerm2 is needed to answer prompts and send replies without leaving the menu bar; elsewhere Approve and Deny focus the terminal instead.

SwarmBar 0.1.0

First release. A macOS menu bar app that answers one question: do any of my agents need me right now?

Watches Claude Code, Codex, Kimi Code, BearCode, OpenCode, Grok Build and Antigravity across every concurrent session. Sessions sort into Needs you, Active and Recent, and an approval can be answered from the popover with the command in front of you.

Install

Download SwarmBar-0.1.0.dmg, drag SwarmBar to /Applications, and launch it. Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so there is no Gatekeeper warning to click through. There is no Dock icon by design: look for the hexagon in the menu bar.

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later
• iTerm2, for answering prompts and sending replies without leaving the menu bar. Everywhere else, Approve and Deny focus the terminal instead of answering for you.

What it does

• Approve and deny through each tool's own control channel: a held hook decision for Claude Code, the plugin's respond endpoint for OpenCode, and read-then-verify terminal answers for the rest. Never by editing a tool's files.
• Inline reply to a finished turn without switching windows.
• Read only. Monitors tail transcripts and session state and never write to them. The only files SwarmBar writes are the approval bridges you switch on in Settings, each with a one-time backup beside it.
• No daemon in your agents, no wrapper to launch them through, no telemetry.

Notes

This is a 0.1. It has been used daily against real sessions of all seven tools, and every approval path was verified live against a real prompt, but it is new. Issues welcome.