CCManager

A session manager for coding agents, built around git worktrees. It runs in a terminal, lists every worktree in a repository with the agent attached to it, and shows whether that session is busy, waiting for input or idle, so several agents can work in parallel without a second terminal window. Worktrees are created, merged and deleted from inside it, gitignored files a project needs can be carried into new ones, and the sessions that were open when it last exited or crashed can be launched again on the next run. Eight assistants are supported — Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex CLI, Cursor Agent, Copilot CLI, Cline CLI, OpenCode and Kimi CLI — each with its own configurable state-detection rules.

Who built itA Japanese software engineer, in his own words, with an account opened in 2019, 68 public repositories and 94 followers. He wrote 566 of the repository’s 770 commits; a workflow bot accounts for 145 more, and about twenty other people have contributed, several of them regularly.

1. 01

   A menu for eight assistants, and a year of steady releases

   The repository was created on 2025-06-07 and has 770 commits, with an unusually even shape for a solo project: 205 in the first month while it was being built, and then between six and eighty-one every month since, including the months in 2026 when most of this archive’s subjects were in their first rush. It has produced 163 releases, from an early 0.0.4 in June 2025 to v4.4.4 in September 2026 — a version line that was restarted at some point, which the numbering still shows. Around that sit 1,256 stars, 93 forks, 276 pull requests and 58 issues, and roughly twenty contributors beyond the author, one of whom has landed seventeen changes. Of the 306 co-author trailers, the largest single group is the 187 that say only “Claude”, followed by Opus 4.5 on 44.

2. 02

   The unit of work is a worktree, and creating one is the hard part

   The problem this tool exists to solve is that two agents editing one checkout collide, so each session gets its own git worktree — and the fallout from that choice shows up in the pull requests. One of them (number 337) is about creating a worktree: the operation held the user on a loading screen until every step finished, and the slow steps ran synchronously, so the interface could not respond at all while they ran. Branch-name generation, git worktree add, copying session data and include files, and the pre- and post-creation hooks now run asynchronously; pressing Enter on the loading screen returns to the menu while the creation continues, and the menu lists the running creations with elapsed time. The author’s own note on the change is worth more than the feature: the automated checks had been run, but he had not yet exercised the flow by hand in a terminal. A smaller one (332) is about reading the menu: the state tag was appended to the branch name, so it started at a different column on every row and scanning for a blocked session meant reading each row to wherever the name happened to end. It now has its own column, and because narrow terminals cannot afford the width, the caller hands the layout a column budget and the old arrangement is used when the aligned one does not fit.

3. 03

   The bug that only happens with Num Lock on

   The best fix in the repository is one nobody could have reported clearly. A user found that Ctrl+E — the shortcut back to the menu — silently did nothing inside an attached session, and only on some machines. The cause is in how extended keyboard protocols report a keypress: the modifiers arrive as a single number that also carries the keyboard’s lock state, adding 64 for Caps Lock and 128 for Num Lock on top of whichever modifiers are actually held. The shortcut matcher compared incoming bytes against strings whose modifier field was hardcoded to the value for control, so a Ctrl+E arriving with the lock bits set matched nothing and fell through to being written straight to the child process — no error, no feedback, and nothing in the interface to explain it. The reason it looked like a machine-specific fault is that laptops commonly power on with Num Lock enabled internally even when they have no numeric keypad. The fix ignores the lock bits when matching, which is the kind of correction that only comes from reading a specification rather than guessing at the symptom.

4. 04

   What restore deliberately does not restore

   Quitting the tool kills the assistant processes it started, so the next launch used to open on an empty menu. The fix keeps a record of the open sessions in a configuration file — written as sessions come and go rather than on exit, so a crash, a forced kill or a closed terminal leaves it intact — and offers to launch them again on startup. The interesting part is the boundary the author drew and wrote down: restoring means running each session’s launch command in its worktree again, and the previous terminal output and the conversation inside the assistant are deliberately not brought back. Reproducing those was considered and dropped, because it would mean owning a transcript format for every assistant, and each one already has its own way of resuming. The distinction is sharper for being inconsistent on purpose: a separate feature does copy Claude Code’s session data between worktrees so that conversation context follows, and that is offered as an explicit action rather than part of the automatic path.

5. 05

   Adopting a convention instead of inventing one

   A new git worktree contains only tracked files, so the things a project needs in order to actually run — a local environment file, a certificate, a fixture — do not come with it. The obvious answer is a configuration key of one’s own, and the author took the other route: support the file name that worktree-aware tools have already converged on. .worktreeinclude, a gitignore-syntax file at the repository root, is read by Claude Code, Codex, Conductor and a standalone command-line tool, so implementing the same name and the same semantics means a file a user already maintains for those tools works here unchanged, instead of requiring a second configuration that describes the same thing. The pull request names the alternatives it could have joined and explains the benefit in terms of the user’s existing setup rather than the project’s convenience.

6. 06

   Two ways to stop a session from asking, and why this one is different

   The README argues its case against another tool for the same job by telling tmux users to stay where they are, then naming three differences. One of them is a safety argument: the other tool’s auto-yes feature “bypasses Claude Code’s built-in security confirmations — not recommended for safe operation.” This project ships the same capability by a different route, and marks it experimental: Auto Approval approves prompts using AI verification, with its own configuration document and a schema file, and the state-detection rules that decide what “waiting” means are configurable per assistant because each CLI announces itself differently. The same instinct shows up in the smaller decisions — adding a confirmation step before exit, with the focus defaulting to cancel and the dialog saying how many sessions would be terminated, because the shortcut that exits had been a single keypress away from killing every running session.

7. 07

   Specifications written in one tool and driven from another

   Two features carry a full specification directory: a requirements document and a design document each, one pair at 34 KB and 52 KB. Alongside them sit three steering documents covering the product, the structure and the technology choices. What makes this worth recording is where the workflow is driven from: ten slash commands under .claude/commands/ — initialise, requirements, design, tasks, implement, status, plus two validators and two steering commands — that run that specification process from a different agent tool than the one whose directory format it is. The rest of the repository-level agent material is modest by the standards of this archive: thirteen documents under docs/ including a migration plan for error handling and the auto-approval configuration, a plugin directory for the assistant’s own plugin system, and an AGENTS.md that is nine bytes — a link, not a file.