PRBar

Tiny macOS menu extra that shows how many GitHub pull requests are open on the repos you care about.

Inspired by CodexBar, but it is a separate app. It talks to GitHub through the gh CLI already logged in on your Mac. No extra token is stored.

The bar is a compact run of counts in repo order, for example 19·10·7·16. Repos with zero open PRs are left out of the bar (all-zero shows 0). Hover for names. Open a repo in the menu to see every open PR.

Install

macOS 14+, Swift / Xcode CLT, and gh (brew install gh && gh auth login). Private repos need repo scope.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sburl/prBar/main/install.sh | bash

That clones, builds, and drops ~/Applications/PRBar.app (no Dock icon). On first launch, Repos… opens so you can add repositories. Open at Login is in the menu.

From a checkout:

./scripts/run.sh

The CLI is named prbar-cli because macOS filesystems treat prbar and PRBar as the same file.

See config.example.json for the file format (~/.config/prbar/config.json).

Features

• Pick any GitHub repos (owner/name or a github.com URL)
• Set a display name and two-letter abbreviation when adding; edit them later in the list
• Drag to reorder; add and remove from Repos… (⌘,)
• Menu header totals open PRs, branches, and worktrees across all repos; each repo row shows its own counts, e.g. Acorn-Compute 28 PRs | 151 branches | 64 worktrees
• Repos with zero open PRs sink to the bottom of the menu (and are hidden from the bar)
• Branch counts come from GitHub; worktree counts come from a local clone, auto-detected at ~/developer/<name> or ~/Developer/<name>, or set per repo with localPath in the config file
• PR rows mark review status: ✓ approved, ± changes requested (hover for details)
• Dependabot PRs always show in each repo list, grouped under a Dependabot header at the bottom
• Count Dependabot PRs only changes the numbers in the menu bar, not the list
• Refresh defaults to every two minutes (one batched GraphQL call for all repos, with a per-repo gh pr list fallback). Refresh Every in the menu can go to 1 / 2 / 5 / 15 / 30 minutes or manual-only; ⌘R always fetches now

CLI

~/Applications/PRBar.app/Contents/MacOS/prbar-cli
~/Applications/PRBar.app/Contents/MacOS/prbar-cli --include-dependabot
~/Applications/PRBar.app/Contents/MacOS/prbar-cli --json

Notes

Menu-bar apps do not inherit your shell PATH. PRBar looks for gh in /opt/homebrew/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, then PATH.

refreshInterval in the config file is seconds. 0 means manual refresh only.

MIT licensed. Copyright BestPriceLC.