legbar

pipx install legbar && legbar

(pip, brew, winget, npm, and apt also work — see Install.)

One screen for the whole fleet: live agent sessions beside GitHub CI, drawn from a single discovery layer so the two panes can never disagree.

roost answers what are the models doing. leghorn answers what are the repos doing. Both are true at once and neither view contains the other — so watching a fleet has meant watching two windows and joining them by eye. legbar draws both lanes on one canvas.

legbar  5 sessions | 1 cursor | 1 need input | 15 ci red | 125k held | 18:37:00

NEEDS YOU                                                                       GITHUB
---------                                                                       ------
!! CONTESTED  heron-ops     2 sessions in one working copy: c5468eb1, heron~     X  roost          ci
 ! WAITING    heron-ops-3c  needs your reply -- 12m  -- fix contested false~     X  roost          #56 ci: skip winget~
   CI RED     roost         ci                                                  >  leghorn        release

WAITING ON YOU
--------------
!cc-heron-op~ FB5  ###-------  32% you 12m 3  ~2^1   fix contested false alarm
 cc-swamp-op~ OP5  ##--------  25% you 12m -  ~1     draft discussions packet

WORKING NOW
-----------
 cc-heron-op~ FB5  #---------  10% ai 3s   2  clean  survey henhouse drift

STARTING
--------
!cu-c5468eb1  -                  - ai 40s  -  -      union TUI mockup

Each session row leads with the tool that owns it — cc- for Claude Code, cu- for Cursor — then model, context bar, who is pending (you or ai) and for how long, subagent count, working-tree state, and what it is doing.

Sessions driven through a local gateway (LiteLLM/Ollama aliases like reef-coder or gemma-32k) get roost's treatment: the task is prefixed (local), the model code renders lowercase, and their token burn shows as its own local header figure instead of counting against held — local lanes cost nothing against a paid plan. Aliases that encode their pinned context in the name (gemma-32k) get that as the bar's denominator; for the rest the percentage is omitted rather than computed against a window the alias never had.

The short ambient loop below is the same program, idling — which is how it spends almost all of its time:

Both are real legbar, unmodified, reading a staged fleet — see demo/ for how it is built and how to re-record. The second contested row is the one worth looking at: a Claude session and a Cursor agent in the same working copy. Cursor writes no session marker and no claim, so a dashboard reading only Claude's session directory cannot see that collision at all.

What each lane shows

SESSIONS — every live agent on the machine. Claude Code sessions are joined by pid against ~/.claude/sessions/<pid>.json, with model, context burn, and status read from the session's own JSONL transcript. Cursor agents appear too, marked with a cu- name prefix — Cursor writes no session marker and no claim, so a fleet view that only reads Claude's session directory is blind to every Cursor agent running beside it. Cursor rows are named by their composer title (falling back to the agent id when Cursor never titled one), and carry the model the composer actually selected — grok-4.6 reads as GROK, not a dash — read from modelConfig in Cursor's own state DB rather than sniffed out of transcripts that almost never name one.

CI / PRS — GitHub Actions runs and open pull requests across every clone, with failures pinned so a red build cannot scroll away.

Install

pipx install legbar

Python 3.9+, standard library only. Works on macOS, Linux and Windows.

legbar also publishes to a few other channels, picked automatically off the same release:

pip install legbar                          # if you'd rather skip pipx
npm install -g legbar                        # Node's on the box already anyway
brew install gmhoward9289-ops/tap/legbar     # macOS / Linux
winget install gmhoward9289-ops.legbar       # Windows

Debian and Ubuntu can add the signed apt repo instead of a one-shot .deb:

curl -fsSL https://gmhoward9289-ops.github.io/legbar/legbar-archive-keyring.asc \
  | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/legbar-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/legbar-archive-keyring.gpg] \
  https://gmhoward9289-ops.github.io/legbar stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/legbar.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install legbar

Windows without a package manager: grab the frozen .exe zip from the latest release.

On Windows the full-screen view needs windows-curses. pip and pipx installs pull it in automatically; if you came in through npm (which can't deliver a pip package), the first full-screen run offers to install it for you — one y and you're in. --no-auto-install suppresses the offer, and --once / --json never need curses at all.

Usage

legbar              # the full-screen view
legbar --once       # render one frame and exit (pipes, CI, screenshots)
legbar --json       # the joined state, for piping somewhere else
legbar --no-git     # skip git probing if it is ever slow
legbar --no-ci      # skip the gh sweep (offline, or when it is slow)
legbar --no-color   # plain text in the full-screen view (NO_COLOR also works)
legbar --interval 2 # refresh every N seconds (default 5)
legbar --waiting-alert 45   # only shout about waits older than 45 minutes

In the full-screen view: q quit, ? help (a glossary of the symbols, then the keys), g toggle git probing, r refresh now. Esc does not quit — on Windows PDCurses can deliver a false Esc.

NEEDS YOU is deliberately hard to tune out. A session waiting on you is the normal resting state of a fleet you are working through one at a time, so a young wait is listed but unmarked and uncoloured; only one past --waiting-alert (default 20 minutes) takes the ! and the colour, on the theory that by then you have forgotten it. Contested trees are exempt — they destroy work rather than delay it, and are loud from the first frame.

Configuration

Every override is LEGBAR_*. The older roost / leghorn / ccwork variable names are still honoured, so an existing install keeps whatever it had configured; the new name wins when both are set.

Two honest caveats

Cursor liveness is inferred, not probed. A Claude row means this process exists (os.kill(pid, 0)). A Cursor row means this transcript moved recently — Cursor writes no pid to join against. That is a weaker signal and it is labelled as one; pid is None for Cursor rows rather than invented.

Cursor's project slugs are lossy. The slug joins path parts with -, and - is legal inside a directory name, so c-Users-me-dev-heron-ops reads equally as dev/heron/ops and dev/heron-ops. legbar resolves each segment longest-first against what actually exists on disk. A slug that resolves nowhere — another machine's checkout, a deleted clone — falls back to the naive split rather than raising.

Two glyph dialects, chosen by the terminal

At startup the interactive view probes its terminal once: an interactive stdout whose encoding is UTF-8 gets the Unicode tier — rounded pane frames (╭─ SESSIONS ─╮) in chrome cyan and leghorn's glyph vocabulary (◉ contested, ✗/✓/●/○/◍ for CI, ↑n ↓n git drift, … for anything cut short). On Windows the encoding alone cannot decide it — every console has reported utf-8 since PEP 528, code page or not — so Windows Terminal is the signal (WT_SESSION in the environment); a bare console, where block drawing mojibakes, keeps the ASCII dialect. So do the pipe-safe surfaces (--once, --json, a redirect), which exist to be diffed and parsed. The context bar (##########) is legbar's own vocabulary and stays ASCII in both dialects.

Force the fallback with --ascii or LEGBAR_ASCII=1; force the Unicode tier on a Windows console you know can draw it (a chcp 65001 conhost with a Unicode font, ConEmu) with LEGBAR_UNICODE=1. A frame never mixes dialects, and the ? help — framed like the panes in Unicode mode — shows whichever glyph set is on screen.

       ,__
     _(o  \__
    /        \
   |  ======  |
   |  ======  |
    \  ====  /
     \______/
      ||  ||
      ^^  ^^

Read-only

legbar reads transcripts and registries, and runs git and gh in read-only modes. It never writes to a repo.

The family

• roost — top for Claude Code: per-session context burn, models, and the subagents a session spawned.
• leghorn — the repo lane on its own: sessions joined to worktrees and real git state, CI, and a commit feed.
• legbar — both lanes on one screen, over one discovery layer.

Questions in the open: Discussions.

henhouse.py is that discovery layer: sessions, transcripts, git, GitHub, and Cursor. It is a working CLI in its own right (python henhouse.py).

License

Apache-2.0