A cockpit for the working day on macOS: your Jira work, your Claude Code sessions, your focus and the news, as instrument panels on the desktop and a pirate captain in the menu bar.
Four Übersicht widgets share one look (avionics displays: green = in progress, amber = needs attention, magenta = focus, cyan = information) and one menu bar item (xbar) keeps the essentials one click away when windows cover the desktop.
| Part | What it is | |
|---|---|---|
| cc-panel | Project display: epics, tasks in progress, Claude Code sessions waiting for you, one-click resume of any ticket in the right folder | screenshot |
| focus-panel | Focus display: eat the frog, one time box at a time, max three items per day, deadlines for the next 7 days | screenshot |
| news-panel | Tech briefing: a daily edition on AI, LLMs and tech from public feeds, grouped in hot topics by Claude | screenshot |
| harlock-panel | Captain Harlock at the helm of the Arcadia, in pixel art. No data, just company | screenshot |
| harlock-bar | Menu bar summary: countdown, today's main tasks, tickets by epic, deadlines | screenshot |
All screenshots use invented demo data (tools/screenshots).
- Annunciators: tasks in progress, Claude sessions waiting for your answer, stale sessions, work still to be tracked.
- Navigation arc: every epic is a waypoint on its completion percentage; a radar sweep passes over them and the busiest epic is your focus (magenta).
- Epic list: open an epic to see its tasks, the next step you left yourself and the repositories where you actually worked on it (branch, uncommitted files, unpushed commits).
- Resume: ▶ reopens the Claude Code session of a ticket, or starts one in the right folder with a
brief (ticket, description, latest comments, last resume note).
/parkwrites the resume note. - To track: valuable work done in Claude sessions without a ticket, already phrased as a ticket and grouped by theme; one click creates it in Jira.
| Rule | On the panel |
|---|---|
| Eat the frog | One frog per day (◆ magenta). Until it is done, before noon, the rest is dimmed. |
| Time boxing | One box at a time on one of today's items, length chosen up front (15/30/60/90′ or the estimate). |
| Parkinson's law | Green bar, amber in the last 5′, blinking red after. One single 10′ extension. |
| Plan the day before | After 17:30 tomorrow appears and new items go there. |
| Next concrete action | Every item is verb + object with an estimate. |
At most three items per day. Unfinished items from past days go back to the parking lot: decide again every day. Deadlines come from Jira (your open issues due within 7 days) and from local items.
Once a day it collects the last 36 hours from public feeds and APIs (Hacker News, Lobsters, Hugging Face papers, Simon Willison, Latent Space, Import AI, …; no HTML scraping). Claude Haiku groups them in at most six hot topics with a 1-5 heat and a short summary, and picks five reads. If Claude does not answer, the most voted items are shown.
Captain Harlock at the wheel, seen from behind, looking out of the porthole while two layers of stars scroll by. The wheel sways, hair and console lights move in steps about once a second. No shell commands, no network; with Reduce motion on, the scene stands still.
A pixel-art Harlock in the menu bar. Next to him: the minutes left in the current time box (amber in
the last 5′, red +N′ when over), or ⏸N when N Claude sessions are waiting for you. Click for:
- Today's main tasks: done/total and whether the open work still fits before the end of the day; start a countdown on any item (its estimate or 15/30/60/90′), mark done, make it the frog, move it to tomorrow; with a box running: done, +10′, stop. Notifications 5 minutes before the end and at the end.
- Tickets in progress: the ones with an open Claude session on top (waiting first), then one submenu per epic, each epic in its own colour; every ticket has its next step, Jira link and resume.
- Deadlines folded in one line, details in the submenu.
It reads the same data as the panels (focus-panel show and cc-panel's cached board), so it costs
nothing extra and works when the desktop is hidden.
Requirements: macOS, Python 3.9+ (the system /usr/bin/python3, no dependencies),
Übersicht for the panels, xbar for the menu bar.
cc-panel and the Jira deadlines need Jira Cloud with an API token; resume and the AI features need the
Claude Code CLI.
git clone https://github.com/paolacarboni/flightdeck.git ~/code/flightdeck
~/code/flightdeck/install.sh # or only some parts: ./install.sh focus-panel harlock-barinstall.sh only creates symlinks (~/.local/bin, the Übersicht widgets folder, the xbar plugins folder,
~/.claude/commands) and never overwrites real files. Then configure Jira for cc-panel as described in
cc-panel/README.md; focus-panel and harlock-bar reuse it.
Start at login. The panels and the menu bar exist only while Übersicht and xbar are running, so both
must open at login. On macOS 13 or later: System Settings › General › Login Items › Open at Login › +,
then add /Applications/Übersicht.app and /Applications/xbar.app. The same switch is in each app:
Übersicht › Preferences › Launch Übersicht when I login, xbar › Preferences › Start at Login.
On the first launch macOS asks to confirm opening an app downloaded from the internet: choose Open.
Just looking? In cc-panel/widget/index.jsx set const DEMO = true;: the project display shows
invented data, no Jira needed. harlock-panel needs nothing at all.
flightdeck/
├── cc-panel/ Python CLI + Übersicht widget + xbar plugin + /park command
├── focus-panel/ Python CLI + Übersicht widget
├── news-panel/ Python CLI + Übersicht widget
├── harlock-panel/ Übersicht widget only
├── harlock-bar/ xbar plugin (Python) + pixel-art icon
├── tools/screenshots/ renders the widgets with demo data in headless Chrome
├── docs/screenshots/ the images above
└── install.sh
Each part keeps its own state under ~/.claude/<part>/ and has its own tests:
for part in cc-panel focus-panel news-panel harlock-bar; do
/usr/bin/python3 -m unittest discover -s $part/tests -t $part
doneTo refresh the screenshots: npm install --prefix tools/screenshots && npm run --prefix tools/screenshots shoot
(needs Node and Google Chrome).
- Privacy. Everything runs locally. Jira is read with your token; the only writes are the issues you
create from To track. The AI features call
claude -p(Claude Haiku, no tools) with ticket titles and short excerpts of your own sessions. - Language. The interface is in Italian for now; translations are welcome.
- Übersicht caveat. A runtime error in a widget can make Übersicht's local server exit; if the panels disappear, restart Übersicht.
- Captain Harlock is a character created by Leiji Matsumoto. The pixel art here is an original fan drawing, not affiliated with the rights holders.