ShipBar

Tactile control for your Cursor AI agent, right on your MacBook's Touch Bar.

What it is

ShipBar is a Cursor extension that turns your MacBook's Touch Bar into a command strip for Cursor's AI coding agent: 6 configurable action buttons plus a settings button, right above your keyboard.

Features

Icon	Button	Action	Command
	Zap	Open the inline AI generate prompt (Cmd+K-style) at your cursor	aipopup.action.modal.generate
	Check	Accept all pending edits from the agent	editor.action.inlineDiffs.acceptAll
	Close	Reject all pending edits from the agent	editor.action.inlineDiffs.rejectAll
	Branch	Duplicate the current chat into a new thread	composer.duplicateChat
	Mic	Toggle voice dictation on/off	composer.toggleVoiceDictation
	Chat	Start a brand new chat	aichat.newchataction

Configuration

Every button is remappable, and any button can be hidden.

Easiest way — Touch Bar: tap the gear button (7th slot, on by default) to open the ShipBar configuration panel right in Cursor. Toggle any button on or off, pick a new command from the preset list or enter a custom command ID, then hit Save. No file editing required.

You can also open the same panel via Cmd+Shift+P → "ShipBar: Configure Buttons", or hide the gear button itself with "shipbar.showConfigButton": false.

Manual way: add a shipbar.buttons block to your settings.json (Cmd+Shift+P → Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON)):

{
  "shipbar.buttons": {
    "slot4": {
      "enabled": true,
      "command": "workbench.action.terminal.toggleTerminal"
    },
    "slot5": {
      "enabled": false
    }
  }
}

• command — any Cursor or VS Code command ID. Changes apply immediately, no reload required.
• enabled — false removes the button from the Touch Bar entirely.
• Only override the slots you want to change; unspecified slots keep their defaults.

Slot-to-icon mapping is fixed (slot1 = Zap icon, slot2 = Check icon, and so on) — icons can't be swapped live from settings, only the command each slot runs and whether it's shown.

See examples/settings.example.jsonc for a fully annotated example covering every slot.

Why use it

Working with an AI coding agent means making the same few decisions over and over: generate, accept, reject, branch, dictate, or start fresh. Each of these normally costs you a window switch, a click hunt, or a trip to the command palette.

ShipBar collapses all of that into a single tap:

• Faster than the palette — one press beats Cmd+Shift+P and typing a command name
• Zap for quick edits — jump straight into inline generate without leaving the keyboard
• Uses hardware you already have — no extra device to buy, just the Touch Bar sitting idle on your MacBook

Requirements

• macOS with a physical Touch Bar
• Cursor (the commands above are Cursor-specific; they won't exist in vanilla VS Code)

Installation

From a packaged .vsix

npm install -g @vscode/vsce
vsce package --no-dependencies

(--no-dependencies is required — ShipBar has no runtime dependencies, and vsce's dependency-resolution step fails on projects without one.)

Then in Cursor: Extensions → ... menu → Install from VSIX... and pick the generated shipbar-0.1.0.vsix.

From source (for development)

git clone https://github.com/max-blackwell/ShipBar.git
cd ShipBar

Open the folder in Cursor and press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host with ShipBar loaded.

Regenerating icons

Icons are sourced from Lucide and rendered to PNG. This includes the six action icons plus the settings (gear) icon used by the config panel button:

brew install librsvg   # provides rsvg-convert
./icons-download.sh

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. Since ShipBar wraps internal Cursor commands, if a command ID changes in a Cursor update and an action stops working, please open an issue with the Cursor version you're on.

License

MIT