Persistent Side Panel for Claude Code with Autonomous Content Management

What This Is

A developer has created an open-source persistent side panel for Claude Code that addresses the issue of content scrolling away during development sessions. The tool is a TUI (Terminal User Interface) panel that runs in an iTerm2 split pane alongside your terminal, with Claude autonomously managing what content appears.

How It Works

The system features three fixed panels:

• Main panel: Claude reads the conversation and decides what to show here - this could be code it just wrote, architecture diagrams, progress checklists, or emoji. You can also explicitly ask Claude to show specific content like documentation or Wikipedia pages.
• Status panel: A dashboard that auto-updates after every Claude response, showing current task, files changed, and decisions made. The developer describes this as "persistent snippets."
• Ambient panel: Displays terminal screensavers when you're between tasks. There are 12 built-in screensavers including rain-city with lightning, a Roku-style sunset cityscape, matrix, and aurora.

You navigate between the three screens using arrow keys, with zero manual commands needed. The tool was built with FastMCP + Textual and is released under the MIT license.

Practical Details

The tool specifically addresses the scrolling problem in Claude Code by providing persistent visibility of key information. The autonomous nature means Claude decides what to display based on the conversation context, though users can also request specific content. The status panel provides real-time updates on development progress without requiring manual tracking.

This type of tool is useful for developers who work with AI coding assistants and want to maintain context across longer development sessions without losing track of previous outputs.