KeepGoing Desktop Tray: your project context, always one glance away

KeepGoing now lives in your menubar. The Desktop Tray is a free macOS companion app that shows re-entry briefings for all your projects at a glance, without opening an editor or terminal.

The problem it solves

If you use KeepGoing with VS Code, a JetBrains IDE, or Claude Code, your re-entry briefings are already there when you open a project. But what about before you open anything?

When you sit down to work, you might have three or four side projects in various states of progress. The question is not “how do I resume?” but “which project do I pick up?” That decision happens before you launch an editor. The Desktop Tray puts the answer in your menubar: click the icon, see every project’s status, and decide where to spend your time.

What it does

The Desktop Tray reads the .keepgoing/ data that your existing setup already captures. For each configured project, you see:

• Last worked: How long ago you were last in this project
• Project intent: The high-level goal you set for the project
• Next step: What you planned to do next
• Active sessions: Which coding sessions are currently running, with per-project counts visible to all users

It is a read-only companion. It never writes session data. All the capturing still happens through whatever tool you already use.

Multi-session awareness

If you have the Session Awareness add-on, the Desktop Tray shows live session tracking across all your projects. Each session appears with its current state:

• Active (green): Someone is working right now
• Idle (amber): A session that has gone quiet
• Finished (grey): A completed session

This is especially useful when you are running multiple AI coding agents in parallel. You can see at a glance which sessions are still working, which have finished, and whether any of them are touching the same files or branches.

The tray auto-polls every 30 seconds when at least one session is active, so the status stays current without any manual refresh.

Cross-session intelligence

When multiple sessions are active in the same project, the Desktop Tray can detect two kinds of conflicts:

1. File conflicts: Two sessions modifying the same file
2. Branch overlap: Two sessions working on the same branch

These are small things that prevent large headaches. Catching a branch collision before two agents diverge is worth more than fixing the merge conflict after.

How to set it up

1. Download the DMG from the releases page
2. Drag KeepGoing to your Applications folder
3. On first launch, right-click the app and select Open (the app is not code-signed yet, so macOS Gatekeeper will block a normal double-click)
4. Create ~/.keepgoing/tray-config.json with your project paths:

{
  "projects": [
    {
      "name": "my-app",
      "path": "/Users/you/projects/my-app"
    },
    {
      "name": "side-project",
      "path": "/Users/you/projects/side-project"
    }
  ]
}

That is it. Click the KG icon in your menubar and your briefings are there.

Works with your existing setup

The Desktop Tray reads the same .keepgoing/ directory that the VS Code extension, JetBrains plugin, MCP server, and CLI all write to. You do not need to change your workflow or install anything extra. If a project has a .keepgoing/ folder, the tray can read it.

This is the same principle behind every KeepGoing integration: the data layer is a set of JSON files in your project directory. Local-first, editor-agnostic, no cloud account, no sync service. Any tool that writes checkpoints, any tool can read them.

Free and local

The Desktop Tray is free. Session data never leaves your machine. There is no account to create and nothing to sign in to. Condensed session counts are visible to all users. Full session detail, cross-session intelligence, and conflict detection require a Session Awareness license.

For detailed setup instructions, see the Desktop Tray setup guide.

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Your context should follow you, not your editor.