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whosup

Stop abandoning your agent sessions. whosup puts every herdr session on one board and shows which pane needs you next.

You run six, ten, fifteen coding agents in herdr panes. Some are working, some finished an hour ago, one is sitting on a permission prompt you never saw. whosup turns every pane of every running herdr session into one browser page: what needs your input, what just finished, what is still running, what went quiet. Click a cell and herdr jumps to that pane.

Quick Start • Why whosup? • What you see • How it works • Features • Settings • Requirements

Quick Start

1. Install the herdr plugin

herdr plugin install fivetaku/whosup --yes

2. Start it (or just restart herdr)

herdr plugin action invoke fivetaku.whosup.start

The board comes up at http://127.0.0.1:4790 and opens in your browser once. From then on it starts with herdr.

3. Open more herdr sessions whenever you like

herdr --session work      # any name, any terminal

Every running session shows up on the board by itself. No list to maintain.

Why whosup?

• You stop polling panes. The top band tells you how many panes need input, failed, finished, or are running. The "next" line names the one to look at first and quotes the question it is asking.
• One click, right pane. Click a cell and herdr focuses that pane, in any tab of any session. On macOS it can bring your terminal app forward too.
• Restarts don't lose conversations. After a reboot herdr restores the panes but not the agents. Empty cells get a resume button that finds the newest Claude Code conversation for that folder and runs AGENT_CMD --resume <id> in the pane. Resume reads Claude Code's conversation history only; with any other agent the pane starts a fresh session.
• Colour means something. Black and white everywhere, orange for the one thing to look at next, red for failures. Nothing blinks on a loop.
• It tells you even when you look away. The tab title shows how many panes are waiting, e.g. (3) whosup, and the favicon lights its orange cell. A pane that just raised its hand gets one short orange ring. The header's sort button switches between by desk and neglected first, which slides the longest-waiting panes to the front of each desk. Turn on alerts in the header for a desktop notification; clicking it jumps to that pane.
• Nothing waiting gets lost. A pane that needs you stays on the board until you deal with it — past midnight, after a restart, through a herdr hiccup. seen only snoozes it for 30 minutes; if it still needs you, it comes back. Closed panes stay in a recently closed row for 7 days and panes you stash stay there until you restore them; from that row you can resume or restore them. A stashed pane that starts working again comes back by itself. Pin the panes you always watch to a row at the top.
• It says when it doesn't know. If whosup cannot reach herdr, the header shows disconnected · last collect HH:MM, the tab title turns into (!) whosup, and the favicon goes grey — instead of a calm board that is quietly out of date.
• Light, dark, your language. The header button cycles the mode (auto / light / dark); the settings panel switches the language (English / 한국어). Palettes follow what real IDE themes use, with text contrast kept at WCAG AA.

What you see

How it works

herdr sessions (main, side, …)
   └─ pane list + agent list, every 3 s  ──►  whosup collector  ──►  SQLite (node:sqlite)
                                                                       │
browser  ◄──  http://127.0.0.1:4790  ◄──  board server  ◄─────────────┘
   │
   └─ click  ──►  pane.focus over herdr's socket  ──►  the pane

One Node process, no build step. herdr's startup hook is a one-shot command: when herdr starts, it launches whosup as a background server and returns. The server then keeps running on its own — herdr does not supervise or stop it — so use the stop action to shut it down. Pane state comes from herdr's agent detection (working / blocked / done / idle); the question text is read from the pane screen; the last request comes from Claude Code's conversation history (~/.claude/projects, or CLAUDE_PROJECTS_DIR). Panes running other agents show no last request, and resume starts them fresh. The collector also listens to herdr's events, so a pane that changes state is collected right away instead of waiting for the next 3 s pass, and open board tabs are updated at once. Without the event stream the 3 s pass still runs.

Trust model. The server listens on 127.0.0.1 only and has no login. Browser requests from other sites that try to change something are refused (a change must come from the board's own address and be sent as JSON), but any program running on the same computer can use its API — including changing settings such as AGENT_CMD, the command whosup types into a pane for resume and new panes. Do not expose the port to other people. The server also answers 403 local only to any request whose Host header is not 127.0.0.1, localhost or [::1], so tunnels that forward a public hostname (Tailscale Serve, cloudflared, ngrok) cannot open the board at all. To watch from another machine of yours, use a port forward that keeps a localhost host, such as ssh -L 4790:127.0.0.1:4790 <host> and then http://localhost:4790, and run the server with WHOSUP_READONLY=1. Read-only blocks changes, not viewing: it does not list folders under your home, but everything on the board stays visible — pane folder paths in the cell tooltips, last request text, question text — and GET /api/settings still returns agent_cmd.

Features

Plugin actions

Settings

Put KEY=value lines in .env inside the plugin config dir (herdr plugin config-dir fivetaku.whosup; ~/.config/whosup when run outside herdr). The file is read only when start launches the server, so after a change run the stop action and then start. The desks-apply action does not read .env; it takes the agent command from agent_cmd in desks.json.

Desks (optional)

If you like a fixed layout — say one herdr session per monitor — describe it once and let whosup create it:

{ "agent_cmd": "claude",
  "desks": [
    { "session": "main", "note": "left monitor", "agent": true,
      "panes": [ { "label": "api", "cwd": "~/src/api" }, { "label": "web", "cwd": "~/src/web" } ] },
    { "session": "side", "panes": [ { "label": "notes", "cwd": "~/notes" } ] }
  ] }

Save it as desks.json in the plugin config dir (herdr plugin config-dir fivetaku.whosup; ~/.config/whosup when run outside herdr) and run herdr plugin action invoke fivetaku.whosup.desks-apply. It only adds what is missing. Open a terminal per session wherever you like (herdr --session main).

Agent restore

herdr can restart agents itself after a reboot ([session] resume_agents_on_restore). If you launch agents through a wrapper, set that to false and use whosup's resume instead, so the wrapper is used.

Requirements

• herdr 0.9.0 or newer. Terminals of the Herdr desktop app (herdr-core) are picked up as well when it is running; either one is enough
• Node.js 22.13 or newer (node:sqlite without a flag); no bun, no build
• curl (the start, status and open actions use it for health checks)
• macOS or Linux

Not whosup

Terminal mirroring, chat, and typing from a phone: ovis. Kanban-driven agents: herdr-board. whosup only looks and jumps.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.