Paddock: Project-Based Spaces for Herdr

At a glance

Paddock is a free, Apache-2.0 mod for the Herdr desktop app. It replaces Herdr's built-in Spaces sidebar with one grouped by project. A project is a git repository, with its worktrees, or any folder you add. Each space appears under its project, and each agent appears under its space with a status light, its session name, how long it has been in that state and any sub-agents it started.

Good fit

Herdr users running several coding agents across a few repositories who want to see at a glance which agent needs them, which is working and which is done. Folded projects still show a spinner while an agent works and a dot when one needs you. If you already use the space-folders mod, Paddock turns those folders into projects the first time it starts.

Consider something else when

Skip it if you are on a Herdr version other than 0.1.11 and do not want to rebuild the mod yourself. Paddock is a copy of that version's Spaces sidebar, so later changes to Herdr's own sidebar will not reach it. Also skip it if you need a project list shared between computers, because each computer keeps its own.

Start here

Ask your Herdr agent to "add the mod at github.com/choam2426/herdr-paddock", or install it by hand. Clone the repo and copy mods/paddock into ~/.config/herdr-app/mods/. Then run herdr-app do layout.clone '{"name":"main","as":"main-paddock"}' and change the spaces block in that layout to paddock. Run herdr-app check ~/.config/herdr-app/mods/paddock. Setup worked if herdr-app status shows "errors": []. To undo it, run herdr-app do layout.switch '{"name":"main"}'.

Cost and requirements

Free and open source under Apache-2.0. You need the Herdr desktop app, and it was built against Herdr 0.1.11. It makes no network calls. Like Herdr's own sidebar, it runs git in your space folders and hc machine ls every 15 seconds. It also runs git rev-parse in each project folder every 10 minutes to tell repositories from plain folders.

Limits to know

The author has tested it only on Windows with Herdr 0.1.11 and the Pi, Claude Code and Codex agents. macOS and Linux are untested. On macOS, a folder typed with different capitalization counts as a separate folder. For remote machines, only the folder check has been tried. Session names come from each agent's terminal title. OpenCode support was written from its source code and not tested.

Related work

• Herdr desktop app: the app Paddock runs inside (context)

Still unclear

• Will Paddock work on Herdr versions newer than 0.1.11, or will you need to rebuild it from RECIPE.md after each update?