open-cockpit

Open Cockpit

A mission control for all your Claude Code sessions.

⬇️ Download   ·   All releases
Available for macOS · Linux · Windows

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What it does

Open Cockpit is a desktop app and Claude Code plugin that solves five problems with running Claude Code at scale:

1. 🔭 Session overview across your entire machine

Every Claude Code session on your device shows up in a single sidebar — color-coded by status (processing, idle, waiting for review). Jump to the session that just finished with a keyboard shortcut instead of hunting through terminal tabs.

2. 🤖 Agent-to-agent orchestration that actually works

Claude Code blocks recursive spawning by default. Working around it breaks Bash tool output. Open Cockpit fixes both: it maintains a pool of pre-started Claude instances and provides a CLI + API so any session can dispatch work to others seamlessly.

id=$(cockpit-cli start "refactor auth module")   # fire-and-forget
cockpit-cli wait "$id"                            # block until done
cockpit-cli followup "$id" "now add tests"        # multi-turn

3. 🖥️ Persistent terminals

Claude Code's native Bash tool resets between calls — no SSH sessions, no virtual environments, no long-running processes. Open Cockpit gives each session persistent terminal tabs backed by a PTY daemon that survives app restarts.

4. 👀 Shared terminal collaboration

Open Cockpit terminals are visible to both you and Claude. You run a command, Claude sees the output. Claude runs a command, you see what happened. This creates a true shared workspace — not just one-shot command execution.

cockpit-cli term exec 'npm test'          # run in ephemeral shell, get output
cockpit-cli term run 1 'make build'       # run in existing tab, get output
cockpit-cli term watch 1                  # follow output in real-time

5. 📝 Intention tracking

Every session writes an intention file — a markdown doc describing what the agent is working on. You can read and edit these in-app. Agents see your edits and adapt their work accordingly, giving you a lightweight steering mechanism beyond just prompting.

How it works

Open Cockpit maintains a pool of pre-started Claude instances running in background terminals. Sessions are reused via /clear and /resume — never spawned or killed on the fly. This avoids the Bash output collision that makes native multi-session use unreliable.

The pool is shared: humans and agents interact with it identically. A human presses Cmd+N to grab a session. An agent calls the API to do the same. When all slots are busy, the least-recently-used idle session is offloaded automatically.

Architecture

1. PTY daemon — standalone process owning all terminal PTYs. Terminals survive app restarts. Multiple clients can attach to the same terminal. (docs)

2. Electron app — manages the pool, discovers sessions, handles offload/resume, runs the API server, and renders the UI (session sidebar, intention editor, embedded terminals).

3. Claude Code plugin — hooks running inside each Claude session that report status back to the app (PID→UUID mapping, idle detection, intention sync). (docs)

Install

Download

Download the latest installer from GitHub Releases:

Platform	File
macOS (Apple Silicon)	Open Cockpit-x.x.x-arm64.dmg
macOS (Intel)	Open Cockpit-x.x.x.dmg
Linux	Open Cockpit-x.x.x.AppImage or .deb
Windows	Open Cockpit Setup x.x.x.exe

Platform notes

• macOS: full feature set including iTerm2 integration and Cursor/VS Code app activation
• Linux: full core features; iTerm and app activation features are macOS-only
• Windows: full core features; CLI (cockpit-cli) requires bash (WSL or Git Bash)

Plugin

Install the Claude Code plugin for session tracking:

claude plugin install open-cockpit@elias-tools

The app checks for both Claude Code and the plugin on first launch and will guide you through setup.