Switchboard

Your command center for Claude Code sessions.

This is a fork. It started from doctly/switchboard and has since gone its own way: some features were added, several were removed, and the code underneath has been rebuilt. If you are looking for the original, head there.

Switchboard is a desktop app that gives you one view of all your Claude Code sessions across every project. Launch, resume and monitor sessions from a single window — no more juggling terminal tabs or digging through ~/.claude/projects to find that one conversation from last week.

Features

• Session list — Every session from every project in one flat list, ordered by recent activity, with running sessions on top
• Built-in terminal — Connect to running sessions or start new ones (Claude or a plain shell) without leaving the app
• Project picker — Start a session anywhere by fuzzy-filtering your projects, entirely from the keyboard: +, type, ↓, Enter
• Remote projects — Run sessions on another machine over SSH, kept alive in tmux, with automatic reconnects and a status card while the link is down
• Status at a glance — See which sessions are working, waiting for input or blocked on a permission prompt
• Full-text search — Find a session by what was discussed, not just when
• Light and dark — Follows your system, or pin it to light or dark from the sidebar
• Usage gauges — Your Claude plan's limit windows at the bottom of the sidebar
• Session names — Picks up names from Claude Code's /rename automatically

What's different in this fork

Added

• A light mode with a system / light / dark toggle. The Switchboard and Ghostty terminal themes follow it with light versions of their own; the Ghostty one keeps its softer contrast, with charcoal text on white
• SSH remote projects with persistent tmux sessions, reconnection, and a live view of what the connection is doing
• A flat, recency-ordered session list with a fuzzy project picker you can drive from the keyboard
• Terminal font family, size and line height settings, applied live to open sessions
• A frameless window, with the app's own headers where the title bar used to be
• A palette based on Slack's dark workspace theme, built on colour tokens
• Archiving a session also stops it

Removed

• The session grid, IDE emulation and its diff side panel, and the Plans, Agent Files and Stats tabs
• Fork, mark-as-unread and the message-history viewer
• The scheduled task button
• The new-session menu: picking a project starts Claude with its defaults, and the configure dialog and plain terminal sessions are gone
• The Windows and Linux builds; Switchboard is macOS-only

Under the hood

• Rewritten in strict TypeScript and SCSS, with CI running the test suite
• Restructured into a hexagonal (ports and adapters) architecture — see ARCHITECTURE.md

Keyboard

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+F / Ctrl+F	Find in the terminal
Cmd+Shift+[ / ]	Previous / next session
Cmd+← ↑ / Cmd+→ ↓	Previous / next session

Thanks

Switchboard was created by Doctly — thank you to Ali Basiri and everyone who contributed to the original, which this fork stands on. The flat session list and project picker are adapted from Niek Haarman's fork.

Download

This fork doesn't publish builds; build it from source with the steps below. Prebuilt releases of the original are on doctly/switchboard.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+
• npm 10+
• Xcode Command Line Tools for the native modules (xcode-select --install)

Development Setup

# Install dependencies (runs postinstall automatically)
npm install

# Start the app
npm start

npm start builds the app and launches Electron. For faster iteration after the first run:

npm run electron

Building

All build commands build the app first, then invoke electron-builder.

npm run build:mac     # DMG + zip (arm64 + x64)

Output goes to dist/.

Releasing

Releases are driven by git tags:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

The GitHub Actions workflow builds the macOS app and publishes to GitHub Releases. You can also release locally:

npm run release   # builds + publishes to GitHub Releases

Set GH_TOKEN in your environment (a GitHub personal access token with repo scope).

Code Signing

For distribution, set these environment variables:

• CSC_LINK (p12 certificate) and CSC_KEY_PASSWORD, or sign via Keychain
• Set CSC_IDENTITY_AUTO_DISCOVERY=false to skip signing (CI artifact builds)

The macOS build uses custom entitlements (build/entitlements.mac.plist) to allow JIT and unsigned memory execution, required by native modules (node-pty, better-sqlite3).

Project Structure

Switchboard is arranged as a hexagon — rules in the middle, the world at the edges, interfaces between them. See ARCHITECTURE.md for what lives where and how to add to it.

src/domain/          The rules. Pure TypeScript: no node, no Electron, no DOM,
                     shared by both processes
src/application/     Use cases, written against port interfaces
src/application/ports/   The interfaces (repository, terminal, filesystem, …)
src/infrastructure/  The adapters: sqlite, node-pty, fs, ssh, electron
src/ipc/             The process boundary — channel names and the API contract
src/main/            Composition root + IPC handler registration + bootstrap
src/preload/         Context bridge; implements the IPC contract
src/renderer/        The UI: app/ (bootstrap, routing), state/, features/, lib/
src/renderer/styles/ SCSS partials, one per UI area
src/workers/         Worker threads (the cold-start project scanner)
app/                 Build output (gitignored) — what Electron actually runs
test/                Node test-runner suites, run through tsx
scripts/             Build (esbuild + sass), icon and postinstall scripts
build/               Icons, entitlements, builder resources
.github/workflows/   CI/CD

The app is written in TypeScript (strict) and SCSS. npm run build compiles everything into app/ with esbuild and sass; npm run typecheck runs tsc over the whole tree; npm test builds and then runs the suites. Node 20 or newer is required — TypeScript 7 will not load on 18.