flow-bar — a menubar for flow

everything in one click

Your work, at a glance.

flow-bar mirrors the flow CLI in a popover — read-only where it counts, one click where it matters.

● Quick switcher search

Click the menubar icon, type to filter your in-progress tasks, press Enter to jump straight in.

● Overview metrics

Exact counts — in-progress, backlog, done, overdue, stale, owners, runs, projects. Tiles route you there.

● Needs you inbox

Owner questions, overdue, and waiting tasks gathered into one attention list.

● Projects & playbooks drill-in

Open a project to see its tasks; browse playbook runs and trigger new ones.

● Owners automate

Status, next tick, parked questions — pause or resume in a click.

● Create tasks intake

A + form to add tasks (and projects) — slug suggestions, duplicate & format validation, a searchable tag picker, and work-dir autocomplete.

● Tags browse

Every tag with counts; drill into a tag to see its tasks. Top tags on the dashboard route here.

● Brief peek read

Glance at a task's brief and recent updates inline — and copy them — without switching to it.

● Reminders notify

Set a reminder — on its own, or linked to one or more tasks — and get a native macOS notification when it's due. Tapping it brings you back to the reminder, where any linked task is one click to open.

● Global hotkey ⌥⌘F

Toggle flow-bar from anywhere with a keyboard shortcut you set in Settings.

● Settings & updates self-update

Hotkey, launch-at-login, and icon style in a Settings window; flow-bar updates itself from GitHub Releases.

● Flow roots & terminal FLOW_ROOT

Switch between multiple flow roots, and pick the terminal backend (zellij / iTerm2 / Terminal.app / Warp / Ghostty) — from the footer.

↳

A companion to the flow CLI. flow-bar reads your tasks via flow … --format json and switches with flow do — it never touches your flow.db. Requires macOS 13+ and flow on your PATH.

configure

Point it at your work.

It all lives in the footer menu — switch flow roots, and choose which terminal flow-bar opens your sessions in.

● Add a flow root

Track more than one FLOW_ROOT — personal, work, a demo.

Open the popover and click the root name in the footer (the drive icon — “Default” at first).
Choose Add Flow Root… and pick a folder that contains a flow.db.
It’s added and made active. Switch anytime from the same menu — Default uses flow’s own root.

● Change the terminal

Pick where flow do opens & focuses your session tabs.

In the same footer menu, open the Terminal submenu.
Pick your terminal — flow-bar passes it to flow as FLOW_TERM.
zellij needs no permission; iTerm/Terminal/Warp/Ghostty use AppleScript and prompt once for Automation (Terminal also Accessibility).

✦

Tip: zellij needs no macOS permission and can focus an already-open session, not just spawn a new tab — the smoothest setup (it connects when flow-bar is launched from within zellij). iTerm / Terminal / Warp / Ghostty work from any launch — they just prompt for permission (Automation, plus Accessibility for Terminal) the first time.

Permissions & updates: this build is ad-hoc signed (not yet notarized), so macOS ties any Automation/Accessibility grant to the app’s signature — the AppleScript terminals may re-prompt after each update. zellij uses no permission and is never affected. A future Developer-ID-signed build will make grants persist across updates.

install

From Homebrew to your menubar.

One tap, one cask — or grab the signed-later .app straight from the latest release.

zsh

# add the tap, trust it, install the cask $ brew tap pa/flow-bar https://github.com/pa/flow-bar $ brew trust pa/flow-bar # one-time, if Homebrew requires tap trust $ brew install --cask flow-bar # …or grab the .app from the latest release $ open https://github.com/pa/flow-bar/releases/latest

First launch: this build isn't notarized yet, so macOS Gatekeeper blocks it once. Allow it with xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/flow-bar.app and open it again.

·bar

A real run, in the menubar.