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Getting started

Saggar runs on macOS 26 (Tahoe) or newer, on Apple silicon. It is a native app — no Electron, no browser runtime — and it is unsandboxed by design, because it drives your real shells in your real directories.

Install

The cask is the short path:

"brew install --cask mcclowes/saggar/saggar"

First launch opens a short welcome that orients you around the question the app is built on, asks which agent CLIs you use, and offers the optional agent handshake. You can ask for it again at any time from Settings ▸ General.

Add a codebase

A project is a directory. Add one with ⌘⇧O and it takes a place on the left menu, with its terminals nested inside it. If kiln is on the Mac, the menu seeds itself from kiln's recent projects — and if it isn't, the menu simply starts empty. Saggar is kiln's companion, not its plug-in, and every seam that looks for kiln reads an absent one as “nothing there” rather than as an error.

There is also a shell command, installed from Settings ▸ General: Saggar . in any terminal adds or focuses that repository on the menu. It lands on the running app rather than spawning a second one.

Open a terminal

⌘T opens a terminal in the current project — the type you last picked from the ＋ menu, or a plain shell until you pick one; ⌘⇧T opens one belonging to no project at all. For a plain shell whatever ⌘T is set to, use ⌘N and ⌘⇧N. Every shell Saggar starts is a normal login shell with three extra facts in its environment — SAGGAR=1, TERM_PROGRAM=Saggar, and a per-session SAGGAR_SESSION — so prompts and tools can tell where they are running.

Start an agent in it the way you always would. Saggar recognizes claude, codex and others whether or not it launched them, and from that moment the session classifies itself: needs you, working, idle, or finished. Those four bands are the app's whole grammar and have a page of their own.

Three things worth setting

  • Text size, twice. The terminal has its own dial ( ⌘= / ⌘- / ⌘0) and so does the app around it (Settings ▸ Appearance). They are independent on purpose: the size you read code at and the size you read an interface at are different questions, so a big display can hold a comfortable 16pt terminal without the chrome beside it reading small.

  • The agent handshake. Opt-in hooks that replace inference with a contract — better status, and exact resume for Claude Code. Settings ▸ Providers.

  • Where projects open. The editor a project's Open in… button uses, seeded on first run to whichever supported editor is actually installed.

Next

Projects and terminals covers how the menu is arranged and the ways it keeps a long day readable. When you're ready to answer a prompt from the sofa, remote control is off until you arm it, and covers the choices it asks you to make.