Keyboard shortcuts

Press or to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Activity badges

Every Claude and Codex root row shows a single badge character at the left of the Name cell, coloured and decorated to signal the session's live state. Row colour (Claude orange, Codex green) stays dedicated to brand identification; the badge is rendered in its own span and carries the activity signal independently.

Base shapes

GlyphMeaning
Active — CPU above the idle threshold in recent samples
Idle — below the idle threshold for the sampling window
(none)Unknown — not enough CPU samples collected yet

Idle escalation

The longer a session has been continuously idle, the more urgent the badge:

Duration in IdleTierColourText suffix
0 – 60 sFreshgray(none)
60 s – 5 minWarningyellow(3m)
> 5 minStalered, bold(12m), (1h+)

The duration suffix makes the state legible without relying on colour — important for users with deuteranopia or protanopia, where yellow / red / green collapse into a similar band.

The timer resets every time a session re-enters Idle, so an Idle → Active → Idle transition doesn't accumulate toward the Stale threshold. A Stale badge means a genuinely uninterrupted idle period.

Pending-tool flag

When a Claude or Codex session is awaiting user approval on a tool call, a flag appears immediately after the activity badge, in bold yellow:

● ⚑ claude

The Tool column (in agent view) shows the tool name.

Why this exists

The real cost of AI coding sessions is not CPU — it's abandoned sessions that accumulate idle cost or block on a tool call nobody notices. The badges are tuned to pull attention when, and only when, something actionable is waiting.