The Windows command center for coding agents
Run your agents across every project from one native window. Built around Claude Code, happy with anything that lives in a terminal: see who's working, answer who's blocked, read what changed, and ship it.
Free. Open source. MIT. No account, no telemetry. Windows 10+. Microsoft Store soon.
A live slice of the workspace: real components, fixture data. Nothing here is a screenshot.
Oversight
Know who needs you, without looking for them
perch wires into the agent's own hooks (Claude Code first, tested on it daily), so state is a fact, not a guess from scrollback. The sidebar keeps score; the dashboard (Ctrl Shift A) buckets everything by who is waiting on whom.
Answer from the card
The agent's actual question, with the reply box next to it. Long or code-heavy asks get Open to reply instead, so you never answer blind.
Ages that cool, tabs that sleep
A finished agent wears its age, and the age fades from hot to cold as it sits: a triage order at a glance. Click the moon and a tab exits politely into its project's Idle drawer; click it later and it resumes.
New · The board
Hand the agent a brief, not a wall of text
Every tab gets a board: throw a screenshot, a file, a link, and a sentence onto it. perch turns each card into something the agent can actually open: images land in the repo, links are fetched and cached for offline reading, and the whole board becomes one markdown file every agent pane in the tab is told about automatically.
Paste anything. It never fails.
Ctrl V resolves url → path → note, in that order. Double-click any card to caption it: "the broken state after login" is what makes a screenshot mean something to an agent that reads text.
Receipts
Trust what shipped, because you can check
The inspector reads a session as a journal: what the agent said, what it did, which files it touched with +/− per file. Each tab wears its own agent's unpushed commits, and nothing stays running behind your back.
Commits with attribution
The ↑N chip counts this agent's commits, not the branch's. Hover for the recap, click for per-file diffs.
Nothing left running
Every localhost dev server, with the pane that owns it, and a kill button for the one that outlived its pane. Cloud machines listed too, with live cost.
And the rest of the room
Git worktree tabs
Parallel agents in separate folders, so they can't overwrite each other.
Per-pane model picker
Fable, Opus, Sonnet or Haiku per pane. A model at its cap says when it resets.
Real terminal, real splits
Your actual shell underneath, split and arranged from the keyboard. Nothing is simulated.
Browser panes
A real WebView2 preview next to the server that serves it. No iframe refusals.
Sessions that survive
Crash-proof incremental save; Claude Code conversations resume across restarts.
Toasts when it matters
A blocked agent can raise a real Windows toast, so you hear about it even when perch is behind other windows.
Port chips
A pane that starts a server wears its port. Click to open.
Boot cover
The frosted glass while an agent starts is perch wiring the tab's context: hooks, shims, resume. Monocle Guy supervises.
Light on the machine
Roughly zero idle background processes, enforced by a test ceiling.
Links that open
An agent that writes report.html gets a clickable link. Relative paths resolve.
Auto-update, quietly
The Store channel updates itself; the GitHub build checks on launch and hourly.
Copy and paste that behaves
Right-click copies or pastes. Shift-drag selects even over a full-screen app like Claude Code.
Your hands never leave the keyboard
Ctrl D, Ctrl S and Ctrl W stay with the shell, as they should. Everything perch owns takes Ctrl Shift.
Recently shipped
The board
Notes, files, links and pasted screenshots, staged per tab, readable by every agent in it.
Sleep a tab
The moon button, the Idle drawer, and waking that resumes the conversation where it left off.
Store-ready packaging
MSIX build for the Microsoft Store, and switching channels keeps every session.
A quieter idle
From 2.4 background processes a second to roughly none, with a test ceiling so it stays that way.
Windows-first. Actually native.
Most agent workspaces are Mac-first, or a cross-platform port where Windows came last. perch is WPF, WebView2 and real Win11 Mica: it sits next to Windows Terminal and the Settings app like it grew up there, because it did.
On a Mac? cmux is lovely. The bird sends his regards.
Questions
Is it free?
Yes. MIT licensed, source on GitHub, no account, no telemetry decisions to agonize over.
Does it need Claude Code?
No. perch is designed around Claude Code and tested on it daily, so that's where it shines brightest, but any terminal agent runs happily in a pane. Codex ships with the same wrapper, and a plain shell is always a pane away.
How does it know what agents are doing?
A bundled perch CLI plus Claude Code hooks: the agent tells its pane what's happening. Nothing scrapes terminal output, and nothing leaves your machine.
Windows only?
Yes, Windows 10 and up, with proper Win11 polish. On a Mac, cmux has you covered.
Give every agent a perch
Free, open source, and native to the OS you actually use.