Sessions show which harness they run, and the row has room to say so

[jbachorik]

Why

Drydock manages sessions across three agent CLIs, and a sidebar row never said which one it was running. Claude, Codex and Pi rows were typographically identical; the only way to find out was to open the session and read the agent sub-tab. With more than a handful of sessions the list also had no way to narrow itself — the text filter matched names, branches and paths, but not "what is still running" or "which of these are Codex".

Adding the mark exposed a second problem. At the default 320px sidebar the row had ~84px left for the session name, because 70px went to action buttons that reserved layout width while invisible and ~62px to a Resume pill restating what clicking the row already did. Names truncated to about nine characters — on a title the agent itself had authored via session_rename. The mark didn't cause that, but it made the row unusable enough to be worth fixing properly.

Options

Identity. A per-agent glyph, a letter chip (C/X/P), or the agent's name spelled out. The name is unambiguous but costs the horizontal room the name column needed; letters collide (Claude and Codex both start with C).

Filtering. Toggle chips, two dropdown menus, or typed tokens (status:running agent:codex) in the existing field. Menus hide the active filter until opened; tokens are composable but undiscoverable.

Filter scope. Hide non-matching rows including repositories with no match; keep repositories and hide only sessions; or dim non-matching rows in place.

Row width. Keep two lines and accept truncation; unmanage the hover buttons when hidden; or move them out of the layout entirely. Unmanaging reclaims the same 70px but reflows every row as the cursor crosses it.

What this does

A per-agent glyph — ✳ Claude, ◈ Codex, π Pi, ? for an agent this build doesn't recognise — in the row's leading gutter and on the session's agent sub-tab, each with its own theme token. Shape carries the identity and colour reinforces it, so the row still reads in greyscale. The sub-tab takes the glyph but not the colour: it already spells the name out, and its accent already means "this terminal owns the keyboard".

Toggle chips under the text filter, for status (running / idle / error) and harness. Facets OR within an axis and AND across them. An empty axis means no constraint — and so does a fully selected one, otherwise "select all three agents" would be the single selection that hides a session whose agent is unknown. When nothing matches, the sidebar says so and offers a way back.

Single-line rows, name first. The branch tag is capped so it yields characters before the name does, and the hover actions float in an overlay layer that costs no layout width, so nothing shifts as the cursor moves down the list. Names went from about nine characters to complete; roughly a third more sessions fit on screen.

UNSUPPORTED_AGENT now classifies as an error, not idle, and the status→facet mapping moved into the domain so the chip you click and the dot you see cannot disagree.

Drawbacks

• The relative-time line is gone. Ordering already carries it — live band first, needs-attention pinned to its front, then idle, each most-recent-first — and the exact time is in the row tooltip. Anyone who scanned that column loses a glance-level signal, and the fix if that turns out to matter is a right-aligned time in place of the branch tag, not the second line coming back.
• A chip filter hides worktree rows. It filters sessions, and an unopened worktree has none. Searching an exact worktree path and then clicking a chip makes the row you searched for disappear.
• A repository with no matching session disappears entirely, taking its + and ⟳ buttons with it. Recovery is to clear the filter; the filter is deliberately transient and resets on restart.
• Hovering covers the row's trailing content. The floating buttons sit over the branch tag and any chip, behind a wash. That is the cost of not reserving their width permanently.
• Existing sessions change appearance on first launch. Anything persisted with an unrecognised agent turns from an idle dot to a red one — intended, but it is a visible change to sessions nobody touched.
• Colour is a weak channel here. Three new hues join a palette that already spends green, red, amber, blue and purple, and a Claude-heavy list is mostly one colour. The glyphs are what actually distinguish the rows.

Closing

The sidebar now answers two questions it couldn't before — what is this session running, and show me only the ones I care about — and the row has the width to say so without truncating the one field a human reads first.

Worth a look with a real cursor before merging: hover a session row and confirm the buttons fade in cleanly without the row's contents shifting, and that clicking the row's trailing edge still opens the session.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code