DevBar

The toolbar that gets out of your way.
A 125-pixel pill at the top of your screen. Hover for ports, clipboard, containers and Claude sessions, or press a key and ask Jarvis.

Windows has a taskbar for your apps, notification icons for background noise, and nothing for the handful of things you actually check fifty times a day: is my Claude Code session done, what's in my clipboard, is anything listening on 5173, did I mean to copy that.

Mac developers have a hundred menu bar apps for this. Windows developers got nothing. DevBar is that missing thing: a tiny pill docked to the top of your screen, about the size of a browser tab, that expands into a small card when you hover it and disappears the instant you don't need it.

• Hover, not click. Glance up, it's there. Look away, it's gone. No window to alt-tab past, no icon to remember, no screen space reserved — every pixel outside the pill is click-through.
• 0.08% CPU while collapsed. Measured, not asserted. Nothing polls, nothing animates, the blur is switched off at the OS level. It costs you something only in the seconds you are actually looking at it.
• Nine modules and an SDK for yours. A module is five methods. No accounts, no trackers, no telemetry — with no keys configured, nothing leaves your machine.

Windows only (10 2004+ or 11, x64), and deliberately so: this is built on real Windows compositor blur and Win32 window behaviour, not a cross-platform shell.

Download the installer from Releases and run it.

• No admin required — installs into your own user profile (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\DevBar), so it is a plain double-click with no UAC prompt.
• No separate .NET install — the runtime is bundled.
• Adds a Start Menu entry, an optional launch-at-sign-in checkbox, and a clean uninstaller.

The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you the first time. More info → Run anyway, or build it yourself below. Every release is built by GitHub Actions from its tag, not on a laptop, and ships with its SHA256 — see the code signing policy.

git clone https://github.com/Vivek-C-Shah/DevBar.git
cd DevBar
.\scripts\build-installer.ps1      # publish + package, produces dist\DevBar-Setup-<version>.exe

winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.8
winget install JRSoftware.InnoSetup

dotnet build DevBar.sln -c Release
.\src\DevBar\bin\Release\net8.0-windows10.0.19041.0\DevBar.exe

Docker, Git status and Build pulse are opt-in — see Config.

All captured from the app actually running — nothing mocked up.

Idle — this is what's on your screen all day:

Claude Code — session state per project, at a glance:

Ports — real listening ports, one click to kill:

Clipboard, Shelf, Docker, Git status, Build pulse

• Hover the pill to expand. Move away and it collapses after a short delay.
• Tap a tab at the top of the card to jump to a module, page with the arrows at the bottom, or two-finger swipe on a precision touchpad. All three do the same thing.
• Pin (top-right) holds it open for a session — useful while babysitting a build.
• Drag a file over the idle pill and it opens so you can drop onto the Shelf.
• Right-click the tray icon for pin, config and exit.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\DevBar\config.json, hand-editable, read on next launch. Module order, disabled modules and clipboard history size all live there with sane defaults. Three fields are opt-in and empty until you fill them in:

{
  "gitWatchedRepos": ["D:\\code\\my-app", "D:\\code\\another-repo"],
  "ciWatchTargets": [
    { "name": "my-app build", "path": "D:\\code\\my-app\\bin\\Release" }
  ],
  "disabledModules": ["media"]
}

ciWatchTargets.path can be a file or a directory; for a directory, Build pulse watches whichever file inside it changed most recently.

Two more affect what the open card costs you, both explained in docs/performance.md: "meshDrift": false stops the glass blobs drifting, and "meshBlobs": 2 (default 4) draws fewer of them.

.\scripts\claude-hooks\install.ps1

Without it, the module can only see that a terminal named "claude" exists. With it, Claude Code reports working, waiting on you and idle per project — and "waiting on you" is the whole reason to glance at the bar. Nothing leaves your machine. Details, and the by-hand version, in scripts/claude-hooks.

Measured on one machine in 20-second samples, not asserted. Nothing polls while the bar is shut, including the blur, which is switched off at the OS level.

Expanded costs real CPU because genuine Windows Acrylic blur-behind is not free — though it used to cost 54.4%, and caching the blurred layers plus dropping the drift to 24fps more than halved it. The trade-off, the before/after, and the two config dials that reduce it further are in docs/performance.md.

Jarvis' wake word is the one thing that costs anything while you are not looking: about 5.4% of a core to keep listening on-device. It is off by default, and the hotkey costs nothing.

public interface IDevBarModule
{
    string Id { get; }
    string DisplayName { get; }
    string IconGlyph { get; }
    UserControl BuildCard();   // your widget, built once and cached
    void OnExpanded();         // start timers here
    void OnCollapsed();        // stop them here - this is the whole performance contract
}

That is the entire commitment: no base class, no lifecycle beyond expand and collapse. Drop a compiled DLL into %LOCALAPPDATA%\DevBar\modules\ and DevBar picks it up on next launch. See docs/architecture.md, and CONTRIBUTING.md if you want to send one back upstream.

• v1 — shell, hover-expand, five modules, tray icon, no-admin installer
• v1.1 — Liquid Glass (Acrylic + mesh gradient), tab-strip nav, Docker, Git status and Build pulse modules, and Jarvis
• v1.2 — winget package, per-monitor support, module template repo, code-signed installer
• v2 — Slack and PR-radar modules, real CI integration for Build pulse (running/failed, not just idle/success)

MIT — see LICENSE. Privacy: PRIVACY.md. Terms: TERMS.md. Code signing: docs/code-signing.md.

I directed this one rather than typed it: the code was written by Claude against a design brief I wrote and kept correcting. The corrections are the interesting part — a full-width bar that missed the "small toolbar" intent and had to become a real shell redesign, and a request for genuine glass that surfaced the tension the whole app is now organised around, which is that live compositor blur is expensive and may therefore only exist while you are looking at it. GlassEffect.cs and docs/performance.md are where that decision lives.