by Hamza Waleed
Manage multiple Claude Code agents at a glance in VS Code — live status cards for each session, no eye strain switching between terminals.
Every agent runs in a real VS Code terminal. Each one reports its own title, one-line TL;DR, progress, and a flag when it's blocked on you — all on a card in the sidebar — so you can keep five sessions humming without staring at five terminals.
Install
From the VS Marketplace: hamzawaleed.glance-claude-code — or in VS Code, open Extensions and search for "Glance for Claude Code".
Requirements:
- VS Code 1.90+
- Claude Code (
claudebinary onPATH) - A workspace folder open
Click the Glance icon in the activity bar to open the panel, then hit + New Session (or Cmd+Shift+G / Ctrl+Shift+G).
What you see
Status cards driven by Claude itself
Glance ships a tiny MCP server and instructs Claude to call its update_state tool at the end of every turn. The tool's JSON payload lights up the card — no transcript parsing, no scraping shell output.
Five fields, sent on every call (pass null for what doesn't apply):
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
title |
2–4 word card title. AI sets it on the first turn; you can rename to lock it. |
tldr |
One short, speakable sentence summarizing the latest outcome. |
progress |
{ value: 0..1, label: string } for multi-step work; hidden on trivial turns. |
needsInput |
Short clause when the agent is waiting on you. Lights the card yellow. |
error |
Short clause when a hard failure blocks progress. Lights the card red. |
The card also tracks lifecycle automatically — turn-complete plays a tone (only when you're not already watching that agent), /clear and /compact reset the card, and Claude's idle "Notification" pings are ignored mid-stream so they don't false-positive the attention flag.
Drag to reorder
Hold any card and drop it where you want it. Order persists across reloads.
Attention badge on the activity bar
When any agent needs input or hits an error, the Glance icon in the activity bar shows a count badge — so you know to come back even when the sidebar is collapsed or you're in another panel.
Heads-up when a turn finishes in the background
If you're not actively watching an agent when its turn completes, Glance plays a soft tone so the result reaches your ears without yanking focus or stacking a notification panel entry. The activity-bar badge and the card's status pip pick up the visual side — see above.
The tone is suppressed when you're already looking at that agent's terminal, so you don't get pinged for work you're staring at.
Sessions persist across reloads
Close VS Code, reopen it — your agents are still there. Reload-the-window doesn't kill them either. Cards render from the last known state immediately; clicking one revives the session via claude --resume <sessionId> only when you focus it, so dormant agents cost nothing.
(Agents you spawned but never prompted aren't persisted, since there's no transcript to resume from.)
Per-agent model picker
The dropdown chevron next to + New Session lets you choose Opus / Sonnet / Haiku per agent. The card shows a small chip with the active model.
Pin a card you don't want to lose
Press p twice (within 400 ms) with a card focused to pin it. Pinned cards animate to the top of the list (FIFO when you pin a second/third), can't be killed with Cmd+Backspace or the X (the X is replaced by a pin icon), and survive reloads. Press p p again, or click the pin icon, to unpin.
Keyboard shortcuts
The whole point of Glance is that you steer a fleet from one panel — no terminal-tab juggling. Most of the shortcuts only fire while the panel itself is focused (Cmd+Shift+G / Ctrl+Shift+G gets you there from anywhere).
From anywhere in VS Code
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Focus the Glance panel | Cmd+Shift+G / Ctrl+Shift+G |
| New agent | Cmd+Alt+N / Ctrl+Alt+N |
With the Glance panel focused
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Cycle agents | ↑ / ↓ |
| Jump into the highlighted agent's terminal | Enter |
| Drop back to the panel | Esc |
| Pin / unpin the highlighted agent | p p (press p twice within 400 ms) |
| New agent | g (or Cmd+Shift+G again) |
| New plain shell terminal | t |
| Rename the highlighted card | r |
Run /clear on the highlighted agent |
c c (press c twice within 400 ms) |
| Toggle bottom-panel maximize (full-screen the terminal) | f |
| Kill the highlighted agent | Cmd+Backspace / Ctrl+Backspace |
Press r with a card highlighted — or double-click a card title — to rename it. The rename box opens with the whole name selected, so you can type straight over it and press Enter to save (Esc cancels). Renames are sticky — AI updates won't overwrite a manual title until you /clear the session.
License
MIT.