Menu Bar Applet

The applet runs as a background process providing quick access to your codespaces from the system tray.

codespace-zed applet

Features

• System tray icon — Z-in-cloud icon; hollow when idle, filled when tracking active codespaces
• Global hotkey — configurable shortcut (default Cmd+Shift+S on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+S on Linux)
• Tray menu — default target, recent repos, full picker
• Codespace polling — monitors running codespaces, sends desktop notifications on state changes
• Auto-stop — stops idle codespaces after a configured duration
• Pre-warm — creates/starts codespaces on a daily schedule before work hours

Hotkey actions

The hotkeyAction config option controls what happens when you press the hotkey:

Value	Behavior
picker (default)	Opens the interactive repo/codespace picker in a native window
previous	Launches the most recently used target from history
default	Launches the config's defaultTarget

Both previous and default fall back to the picker if there's no history or no default target.

Quick reconnect

When you click a repository in the tray menu, the applet passes the repo (or config target name) directly to the child process, skipping the repo selector TUI. If there is only one codespace for that repo and it is already running with an SSH config on disk, the applet focuses the existing Zed window without any intermediate UI.

Service management

The applet is designed to be managed by your OS service manager.

macOS (launchd)

The home-manager module automatically creates a launchd agent when daemon.enable is set (defaults to true).

Linux (systemd)

The home-manager module creates a systemd user service, or use the included service file manually:

cp codespace-zed.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user enable --now codespace-zed

Config

See the daemon section in Configuration.