Coordinate your many agents with ease from a terminal sidebar - giving you glanceable information and quick navigation - where you are right at home already.
Stop dealing with everyone creating yet another Electron app to manage agents and just do it from your favourite place. We've come to love vertical tabs in a browser, and chatbot interfaces, now it's in your terminal - where you can see what state each agent is in and visually distinguish between them. And you can still have terminals interleaved between your agents.
Every agent is a four-line card, and the sidebar has an expanded and a collapsed view:
| expanded | collapsed |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Want it denser? Two shorter row heights fold the card back to two lines, or to the classic dense list. It takes effect at your next launch.
| status |  waiting on you ·  working ·  finished while you were away ·  idle ·  last turn failed ·  its directory is gone ·  dormant, half-faded; opens where it left off ·  opening ·  a terminal tab (colours mean the same) |
| battery | 105k context spent, in tokens, coloured by how much of your smart zone is goneTERM, a terminal tabblank, nothing measured yet |
| mark | blank, the repo's ordinary checkout ·  on a branch ·  in its own git worktree |
| chip | the name you gave the session with /rename; blank until you doon a terminal row, the tab's name |
| repo |     one colour per repo, wherever it appears |
| text | Claude's own description of the session, not your prompt on a terminal row, the last command it ran |
| branch | the branch this checkout is on, beside the repo; expanded view only blank, an ordinary checkout |
| PR | #232, the pull request this branch is driving, looked up in the backgroundblank, there isn't one |
| agent |   who is running the conversation, in their own colour, and the model beside it (fable, sonnet). Codex isn't supported yet: the icon is ready, the launch profile is on its way |
| effort | how hard the agent is thinking, as set with /effort: lo md hi xh mx aublank, nothing read yet |
| clock | while the agent is working, how long this turn has been running, lit blue: seconds under a minute (42s), then minutes and seconds through 9m59s (1m 7s), then minutes from ten (10m)once it stops, the same number dimmed and coarser: how long since you last spoke to it ( 4m, 3h, 2w) |
| subagents |  something is still running under this agentblank, nothing is |
| ask | what a waiting agent is blocked on, in the colour of its dot: Bash (cargo publish), the tool it wants permission forblank, it isn't waiting on you |
Seeing used context per agent is powerful, so the token count sits on every card in both views, coloured by how close that conversation is to the end of its useful thinking. You can set where you believe the smart zone of your model ends, which is where the count turns red:
export CLAVE_AGENT_SMART_ZONE_TOKENS=150000 # the defaultPairs well with rot-reducer, a plugin that informs Claude itself when its context is running low.
You need zellij (0.44.3 is what's tested), claude,
git, plus fzf and zoxide for the directory picker (your fleet ranks it, zoxide fills in the rest), and a
Nerd Font in your terminal, version 3.5 or newer
so the provider icons have glyphs. macOS and Linux.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/olliegilbey/clave/releases/latest/download/clave-installer.sh | sh
clave # from a terminal OUTSIDE zellij; clave makes its own sessionFirst launch sets the machine up: Zellij config and keybinds, clave's status
hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json (additive, your own hooks are left alone),
a wrap around your Claude status line command so the battery reads live (your
command still runs, unchanged; with none of your own, the wrap prints nothing),
and the plugin permission cache. That's what lets an agent report its own
state. clave doctor explains anything that didn't land.
Then Alt+a, pick a directory, choose new. That's your first agent.
Upgrading? Re-run the installer, quit every running clave session, start fresh.
Building from source
Rust (stable) and just, then:
git clone https://github.com/olliegilbey/clave && cd clave
git checkout v0.5.1 # `just release` refuses a dirty or untagged tree
just setup-toolchain # adds the wasm32-wasip1 target, once
just release # builds, then installs the launcher and versioned artifacts
# Put the launcher on your PATH in your SHELL CONFIG, not just this shell.
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/share/clave/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc # zsh
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/share/clave/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc # bash
exec $SHELLAlt+a |
add an agent: pick a directory, then new or resume |
Alt+↑ Alt+↓ (or Alt+k Alt+j) |
walk the running agents |
Alt+1…Alt+9 |
jump straight to a row, running or closed |
Alt+Enter |
wake the selected closed row |
Alt+o |
back to where you were |
Alt+c |
toggle collapsed or expanded view of the sidebar |
Alt+t Alt+w |
new terminal tab, close tab |
Alt+f |
toggle a floating shell over the current tab, great for your terminal based editor at the same time |
Everything clave binds lives on Alt. Five stock Zellij Ctrl bindings that
Claude Code needs (Ctrl+g/t/o/b/q) are unbound for you; the rest of
Zellij's keys still belong to Zellij.
- Each tab is a terminal. As usual. But with extra info shown in the tab text.
- If the terminal is an agent TUI (like Claude Code), the sidebar is populated with rich information about the agent state.
- Sidebar state comes from either Claude Code hooks, or from your
.claudejsonlstore that Claude Code already keeps. - Your agents survive restarts. Relaunch and every agent tab you had open comes back, in the order you had them. The top one picks up straight away, the rest pick up when you arrive at them. Plain terminal tabs do not come back. Tabs you had CLOSED stay closed as dormant rows: open one with
Alt+Enterand it resumes where it left off. - Running tabs sit above closed ones, so the agents and terminals you're using are quick to cycle through (with
Alt+↑Alt+↓). - The tab list orders itself by attention. A modified "frecency" algorithm is used to keep the tabs you're most likely to reuse at the top.
Want to work on it? Start with CONTRIBUTING. Something broke? Open an issue.
The clave is the foundational rhythm an entire ensemble locks to, the part everything else syncs around. It's also Spanish for key / keystone (it's keyboard-driven), and the archaic past tense of cleave, to split, as in splitting the screen into panes.
MIT © Oliver Gilbey