What it does
It is a menu-bar app and a hardware bridge in one — no Node, no daemon, no configuration to speak of. It watches Herdr for what your agents are doing and paints that onto the pad, so does anything need me? is a glance rather than a hunt through panes.
| Key colour | What it means |
|---|---|
| Red | Blocked — the agent is waiting on you |
| Amber | Working |
| Blue | Done — finished, but you haven't looked yet |
| Green | Idle — finished and seen |
The underglow carries the worst state across every agent, so the answer is readable from across the room.
The rest of the pad
- Stack floats the GitButler stack for whichever agent has focus, without stealing the keyboard.
- Tabs cycles the tabs of the focused Herdr window.
- Land lands the focused agent's branches, bottom first, after showing you the plan.
- Voice taps right command, starting and stopping Superwhisper.
- Macro keys type a string you configure into the agent's prompt.
- The dial tunes reasoning effort; the joystick switches model.
Installing
- Download, unzip, and drag
MicroManager.appto your Applications folder. - Launch it. macOS will ask for Input Monitoring — grant it. This is not optional: without it the app cannot talk to the pad at all.
- Toggle the manager off and on from the menu-bar panel so it reconnects with the new permission.
You will also need
A Work Louder Creator Micro 2, and a running Herdr server with some agents in it — Micro Manager reads Herdr's socket directly, so there is no plugin to install on that side. Quit Work Louder's Input app and the Codex desktop app while you use it: all three drive the same lighting and will fight over it.
The Inspector
A debug UI ships inside the app — open it from the Inspector button in the menu-bar panel. It logs every message in both directions, decodes the device's notifications, and lets you drive the lighting by hand: per-key colours, effects, the underglow, and a raw JSON-RPC console.
Hacking on the pad yourself
The protocol is written up in full — the raw-HID framing, the vendor RPC that reaches individual keys, the keymap binding that makes per-key colour possible at all, and how to read key, dial and joystick events back.
Building from source
git clone https://github.com/schacon/micro-manager.git
cd micro-manager
./scripts/bundle.sh --installRequires a Swift 5.9 toolchain. The script signs with the first Developer ID or Apple Development identity in your keychain — which matters more than it sounds, because macOS keys the Input Monitoring grant to the signature, and an ad-hoc one changes on every build.