What is codex-status-bar?

Codex Status Bar is a native macOS menu bar app that keeps you posted on what OpenAI's Codex Desktop or Codex CLI is doing, without needing to switch back to the app itself. A small animated cloud icon in your menu bar shows whether Codex is thinking, actively using a tool like reading or editing a file or running a command, waiting for your approval, or sitting idle. It can also show when a task is using an MCP server and tool, and how many delegated subagents are currently active. Each active Codex task gets its own row in the dropdown, showing the real chat title, the git branch and project it belongs to, whether it is running in the desktop app or the CLI, which model is in use, and any active MCP tool. When more than one task is running at once, the icon prioritizes showing an approval request over ongoing work, and ongoing work over idle. A separate section lists every MCP server Codex is configured to use and its current state, such as starting, ready, failed, or needing authentication, along with how many tools each one offers. This live health information comes from a small local sidecar process, and sensitive details like URLs, credentials, and prompt or response content are deliberately left out of anything the app saves to disk. The app requires macOS 12 or newer and a recent version of Codex Desktop or Codex CLI. There is no packaged release yet, so it needs to be built from source using a bundled script, which also handles installing its hooks into Codex's configuration. It can alternatively be installed as a Codex plugin instead of the full app bundle, though the README warns not to run both the app and the plugin's hooks at the same time, since that produces duplicate updates. The project is a fork of an existing Claude focused status bar tool, rebuilt for Codex, has no analytics beyond a once a day update check, and is released under the MIT license as an unofficial, community project not affiliated with OpenAI.