[FEATURE] Desktop sidebar: indicate which projects have work running
The projects list in the desktop app's left sidebar renders every project title identically, whether or not anything is running inside it. There is no way to tell from that list that a project has an active process — you have to open the project and check the Background tasks panel.
Request
Style a project's title differently (a colour change, or a small dot next to it) when that project has a running background task or an active session.
Why it matters
In a session today I published an artifact, which auto-armed a monitor_ws listener ("live updates for artifact"). It ran for 31 minutes. Nothing in the projects list indicated it, and finding it meant opening the Background tasks panel. Long-lived listeners and pollers are easy to leave running precisely because they are silent — the sidebar is the one surface you look at constantly, and it is currently the one surface that says nothing about activity.
Notes on scope
- A rollup at project level is the useful unit — the sidebar is where you choose what to look at, so that is where the signal belongs.
- Distinguishing running from needs attention would be a bonus, but a plain "something is active here" already solves the problem.
- Related, but not the same thing:
- #78595 — session-list status indicators, scoped to the VS Code extension
- #74875 — a desktop session indicator misbehaving while idle
Environment
Claude Code desktop app (macOS).