zhovner/anybar

AnyBar is a tiny app that puts a colored dot in your Mac's menu bar (the top-right area where the clock and other icons live). That's it, it's a simple visual status light that you can control from anywhere on your computer to show whatever status you want. The way it works is straightforward: once you launch AnyBar, it listens for messages on your computer. You can send it a text command like "red" or "green" and the dot changes color instantly. You send these commands using simple text messages over a local network connection, so any program on your Mac can control it, whether that's a shell script, a build tool, a Python script, or anything else. This means you can wire AnyBar up to notify you about whatever matters: a build finishing, a background job completing, a server going down, or even just your mood. The README lists all the dot colors available by default (white, red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, black) plus a couple of icon variants (a question mark and an exclamation point). You can also create your own custom images and drop them in a hidden folder on your computer, and AnyBar will display those too. If you need multiple status dots on your menu bar at once, you can run several instances of AnyBar, each listening on a different port. This repo has been popular enough that people have built adapters for nearly every programming language and shell you can think of, Python, Node, Ruby, Go, Rust, and many others, so you can integrate AnyBar into whatever tools or scripts you already use. Some people have even built plugins for big tools like WebPack, IntelliJ IDEA, and Jupyter notebooks that automatically update AnyBar when something important happens.