tmux-agent-status

The anti-dashboard for AI coding agents in tmux. No sidebar, no live feed of prompts and tool calls, no desktop notifications, no daemon. For Claude Code, Codex, opencode and pi: nothing is shown while an agent works. When one needs you — blocked on a permission, or just finished — you get a small marker in the bar, plus a searchable popup to jump straight to it. It lives entirely inside tmux.

What you see

Three states, and only two of them ever show up. Working is deliberately invisible.

1. Silent until something needs you

The bar at three moments: five agents working (nothing shown), codex finishing (a quiet ✓), and claude blocking on a permission prompt in another session (⚠). The ✓ clears the moment you focus that pane, with nothing to dismiss.

2. When an agent needs you

The ⚠ stays in the bar until you deal with it. If you want a nudge as well, turn on the banner (set -g @agent-status-banner on): for a few seconds the status line of every attached client shows which agent is blocked and where. It never shows if you're already looking at that pane, and never twice within 10 seconds for the same one.

3. prefix a (or prefix A): search and jump

A popup lists every agent in every session: needs-you first, then done, then working, then agents that haven't reported yet (○, found by process name). The preview shows the selected pane's latest output, here the exact command it is asking permission for.

Type to filter by agent, session or window. Enter jumps.

4. Land right on the prompt

Enter switches session, window and pane.

Answer it and the warning clears itself. The finished agent's ✓ waits for you.

Requirements

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install tmux git jq fzf (the rest is normally preinstalled). Arch: sudo pacman -S tmux git jq fzf.

Linux is what it's developed and tested on. Nothing here is desktop-specific, so macOS should work with a newer bash, but it is untested. The pi and opencode adapters run inside those agents' own runtimes (Node), so they need nothing extra.

Install

Quick start (TPM): needs TPM installed first.

# ~/.tmux.conf
set -g @plugin 'gs/tmux-agent-status'

tmux source ~/.tmux.conf   # then press prefix + I to fetch the plugin
~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-agent-status/install.sh all   # wire up every installed agent

That's it — two commands, no binary to download, no config to hand-edit. install.sh all is idempotent and safe to re-run; add --uninstall to undo it.

Without TPM, add to tmux.conf, after your status-bar options (use the path you cloned this repo into):

run-shell /path/to/tmux-agent-status/agent-status.tmux

The plugin prepends #{@agent_summary} to status-right and appends a marker to the window formats. Set @agent-status-modify-status off / @agent-status-modify-window-format off to place #{@agent_summary} / #{@agent_mark} yourself.

Then connect the agents — this is the same step the TPM quick start above already ran for you via install.sh all; run it yourself if you installed without TPM, or to wire up individual agents (each step is optional, idempotent and reversible with --uninstall):

./install.sh all            # or: claude | codex | opencode | pi

Verified so far: pi (live), Claude Code (live: a real claude -p run goes working → done → cleared; the permission waiting path is covered by payload-shape tests, not a live prompt). Codex and opencode adapters are written against their documented events but not yet run live: please report what you see.

Agents that were already running when you installed keep running without reporting: restart them (in pi, /reload). They still appear in the list as ○ because they are found by process name.

Keys

Banner (optional, off by default)

A short message on the status line when an agent starts waiting (not when it finishes). It is the only "notification" the plugin has, and it stays inside tmux: nothing is sent to your desktop, so it also works over SSH and on machines with no notification daemon.

• Skipped when you're looking at that pane; repeats for the same pane within debounce seconds are dropped.
• Enable: set -g @agent-status-banner on. Length: @agent-status-banner-ms (default 5000).

Options

set -g @agent-status-<name> <value>

How it works

Agents push their state through hooks: agent-status set working|waiting|done. The state is one small file per pane in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/agent-status-$UID/. Every change recomputes two tmux options, @agent_summary and @agent_mark, so the bar updates instantly and nothing polls.

• Records of closed panes, or panes with no process left except a shell, are dropped automatically (decided from the pane's process tree, so wrappers like sh -c "agent; …" are fine).
• A done that arrives while you are watching that pane is never recorded.
• Everything is a silent no-op outside tmux, and hooks never fail or slow the agent.

agent-status set <working|waiting|done> [--agent NAME] [--msg TEXT]
agent-status clear | seen [PANE] | refresh | list
agent-status pick [CLIENT]                 # the fzf popup
agent-status jump next [CLIENT] [PANE]     # oldest agent that needs you
agent-status jump pane PANE [CLIENT]       # used by the fzf-less menu
agent-status open | menu [CLIENT]          # what the key runs / the plain tmux menu

Privacy and safety

Everything is local: no network, no telemetry. State is a few bytes per pane in your runtime directory ($XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, mode 700; the /tmp fallback is only used if it is owned by you). Agent-supplied text (messages, names) is stripped of control characters and # is escaped before it reaches tmux. install.sh edits ~/.claude/settings.json and ~/.codex/hooks.json (backed up next to them as *.bak.tmux-agent-status) and only ever adds or removes its own entries.

Development

tests/run.sh          # runs against a private tmux server
shellcheck -x -S warning bin/agent-status adapters/hook.sh agent-status.tmux install.sh

CI (status) runs both on every push.

License

MIT. Copy it, change it, sell it — just keep the copyright notice.