Hopback

Get back to your Claude Code sessions in VS Code.

Hopback is a macOS menu bar app for people who run several Claude Code sessions at once. It shows which session each VS Code window is on, tells you when one is waiting for you, and takes you back to any session, open or past, with a hotkey or a search.

Download for macOS Source on GitHub

Free and open source (MIT). macOS 13 or newer, Apple silicon and Intel.

⚠1 ⚙2 · ▢8Wed 10:42

What it does

The menu bar shows a short summary, for example ⚠1 ⚙2 · ▢8: one session needs you, two are working, and eight VS Code windows show a Claude Code session. Click a row to go there. If a window shows the session, Hopback brings that window to the front, even from another Space; otherwise it opens the folder in VS Code and then the conversation.

Know who needs you

Every session waiting for you is listed under Needs you, shown in a window or not, and a banner tells you the moment one starts waiting.

⚠️waiting for you to approve a tool call
❓waiting for an answer, or a plan review
⚙️working
💤finished its turn

Hotkeys

VS Code windows are numbered A→Z by folder. Jump straight to one, or to the next session that needs you.

⌃⌥1…⌃⌥9go to window 1–9
⌃⌥0next session that needs you
⌃⌥⇥ ⌃⌥⇧⇥next / previous window
⌃⌘Csearch open sessions
⌃⇧⌘Csearch history

All of them can be changed in Settings.

Search and Ask

Search every Claude Code conversation on your Mac by title and folder, and with three or more characters by conversation text, with a snippet around the hit.

Ask: can't remember the words? Type ? and describe it, like ? the one where we fixed the flaky login test. Hopback asks your own claude to find it, with read-only tools.

Install

Needs macOS 13 (Ventura) or newer and Visual Studio Code with the Claude Code extension.

  1. Download

    Get Hopback.dmg from the latest release and drag Hopback to Applications.

  2. Allow it to open (once)

    Hopback is not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS refuses to open it the first time. Clear the quarantine flag in Terminal:

    xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Hopback.app

  3. Turn on Accessibility

    Open Hopback; the welcome window walks you through it. Accessibility lets Hopback list VS Code's windows and raise one: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → Hopback.

  4. Add the Claude Code plugin

    The plugin tells Hopback when a session is working or waiting. In Claude Code, run:

    /plugin marketplace add aaronsuns/hopback
/plugin install hopback@hopback

    Then start a new session. It writes one small status file per session to ~/.claude/hopback/ and nothing else.

Free & open source

MIT licensed. Hopback runs entirely on your Mac and sends nothing anywhere, except the update check against GitHub and Ask, which runs your own claude.

Repository · Releases · Issues

Not affiliated with Anthropic

Hopback is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by Anthropic. "Claude" and "Claude Code" are Anthropic's names for their products.