A single-file GitHub Copilot CLI extension that runs a local web dashboard for monitoring and managing all your concurrent Copilot CLI sessions.

⚠️ Note: This is a personal project I built before the official GitHub Copilot desktop app shipped its own session management UI. It is not intended to replicate or compete with the Copilot app — it just solves some different problems I had around multi-session workflows, workspace persistence, and AI-organized todos. Sharing in case any of it is useful to others.

🪟 Platform: Windows-first (uses Windows Terminal wt for tab launching and PowerShell for some helpers). The web dashboard itself works cross-platform, but tab-launching features require Windows Terminal. PRs to broaden platform support are welcome.

• Real-time view of every running and recent CLI session — status, turn count, tool calls, errors, last activity, summary, branch, repository.
• Auto-refreshing via Server-Sent Events (SSE) — no manual reload needed.
• Search & filter — type to instantly filter sessions by title, goal, repo, branch, or any text.
• Group by — organize session cards by status, repository, or branch.
• Pin sessions — pin important sessions to the top.
• Per-session notes — free-form notes attached to a session id, persisted to disk across restarts.
• Timeline view — expand any session card to see its full event history (turns, tool calls, errors).
• Attention alerts — sessions waiting for user input flash and trigger an optional sound alert (🔔 toggle).
• Quick respond — tooltip showing the question a waiting session is asking, so you can context-switch quickly.
• Light/dark theme — toggle with 🌙 button; remembered in localStorage.

• Resume — one click opens a new Windows Terminal tab and resumes a session by id (--resume).
• Focus — click to bring an already-running session's terminal tab to the foreground (uses a warm PowerShell process for fast tab switching).
• Kill — terminate a running session from the dashboard.
• Cleanup stale sessions — 🧹 button finds sessions older than 30 days and lets you delete their state directories.

• Auto-save — the extension snapshots all active sessions to saved-workspace.json every 60 seconds.
• Startup guard — refuses to shrink the saved set during the first 3 minutes after startup (prevents a fresh terminal with 0 visible sessions from clobbering a good save).
• Rolling backups — keeps 10 numbered backup snapshots (.1 = newest, .10 = oldest), rotated only when the session list actually changes.
• Manual save (💾 button) — force a snapshot of the current session set.
• Restore (🔄 button) — re-open all saved sessions in new Windows Terminal tabs. Deduplicates against already-running sessions.
• 📜 Snapshot browser — browse all backup snapshots in a modal, inspect which sessions each contains, and promote any backup to the active save file (safely rotating the current one into the backup chain first).

Accessible at /todos. Paste a brain-dump of tasks and let an LLM (via the Copilot chat API) parse and categorize them:

• AI parsing — sends your raw text to gpt-4.1 (with fallback chain) to produce structured, categorized todos.
• Drag & drop reordering — within and across categories.
• Mark complete / delete / edit inline.
• 🚀 Worktree launcher — click 🚀 on any todo to:
  1. Create a sibling git worktree for the selected repo on a <alias>/<slug> branch.
  2. Drop a .copilot-todo.md context file into it with the todo's description.
  3. Open a new terminal tab running copilot in that worktree.
• Repo picker — auto-discovers git repos from configurable scan directories.

Accessible at /analytics. Shows aggregate stats across all sessions:

• Total sessions, total turns, total tool calls, total completions, total errors.
• Per-session breakdown table.

Accessible at /reports. Generates weekly and monthly rollup reports:

• Sessions started, turns, tool calls, completions, errors per time period.
• Persisted as JSON in ~/.copilot/activity/reports/ for historical reference.

A dropdown in the header bar lets you quickly open any discovered repo in VS Code or Visual Studio.

• Screen blank — blacks out all monitors (click/key/mouse to dismiss). Useful when you step away.
• Lock countdown — after the blank is dismissed (someone touched your machine), a 3-second countdown starts before LockWorkStation fires. Cancel button in the dashboard UI.
• Webcam capture — on dismiss, captures a photo via webcam (requires Python + OpenCV) and saves to ~/.copilot/intrusion-photos/.
• Intrusion alert banner — the dashboard shows a red flashing alert with the captured photo if someone triggered the blank while you were away.

The extension is a single extension.mjs file with no build step or npm install.

• GitHub Copilot CLI installed and signed in (this is what loads the extension)
• Git on PATH (used for repo discovery and worktree creation)
• GitHub CLI (gh) signed in (gh auth login) — used by the todos page to call the Copilot LLM for parsing your brain-dump
• Windows Terminal (wt) on PATH — required for any feature that opens a new terminal tab (Resume, Restore Workspace, Todos 🚀 launcher). Comes built-in on Windows 11; install from the Microsoft Store on Windows 10.

The extension must live in <USER_PROFILE>/.copilot/extensions/session-dashboard.

Windows (PowerShell):

git clone https://github.com/fernandesi2244/copilot-cli-session-dashboard.git `
  "$env:USERPROFILE\.copilot\extensions\session-dashboard"

macOS / Linux (bash):

git clone https://github.com/fernandesi2244/copilot-cli-session-dashboard.git \
  ~/.copilot/extensions/session-dashboard

The Copilot CLI auto-discovers extensions in ~/.copilot/extensions/ on next startup — no registration needed. Just launch Copilot CLI as usual:

copilot

On startup the extension picks a random free port and writes it to ~/.copilot/session-dashboard-port. Open it in a browser:

# Windows
Start-Process ("http://127.0.0.1:" + (Get-Content $HOME\.copilot\session-dashboard-port))

# macOS / Linux
open "http://127.0.0.1:$(cat ~/.copilot/session-dashboard-port)"   # macOS
xdg-open "http://127.0.0.1:$(cat ~/.copilot/session-dashboard-port)" # Linux

The repo is just a git clone, so updating is a git pull:

cd "$env:USERPROFILE\.copilot\extensions\session-dashboard"
git pull

You must then restart any running Copilot CLI host — the extension does not hot-reload.

Everything works out of the box, but you can tune two things:

Every branch the todos launcher creates is prefixed with your alias. Resolution order:

1. COPILOT_DASHBOARD_USER_ALIAS env var
2. userAlias in ~/.copilot/session-dashboard-config.json
3. Local part of git config --global user.email
4. Literal "user"

The dashboard launches new terminal tabs with copilot --resume=<id>. If your Copilot CLI is invoked via a wrapper (e.g. agency copilot on internal Microsoft builds), override the command:

1. COPILOT_DASHBOARD_CLI_COMMAND env var, or
2. copilotCommand in ~/.copilot/session-dashboard-config.json

The dashboard auto-discovers git repos in these directories so you can pick one in the todos UI. Defaults (each only used if it exists):

• ~/source/repos
• ~/source
• ~/Documents
• ~/code
• ~/projects
• ~/git

Extend via either:

• COPILOT_DASHBOARD_REPO_DIRS env var (; or , separated)
• repoScanDirs: ["C:\\\\path\\\\one", "/home/me/other"] in ~/.copilot/session-dashboard-config.json

~/.copilot/session-dashboard-config.json:

{
  "userAlias": "jane",
  "copilotCommand": "copilot",
  "repoScanDirs": ["D:\\\\repos", "C:\\\\work"]
}

• Windows: Fully supported. Uses Windows Terminal (wt) for tab launching and PowerShell for screen-lock / focus helpers.
• macOS / Linux: The HTTP dashboard and most monitoring features will work, but anything that shells out to wt or PowerShell will be a no-op or fail. Pull requests adding cross-platform terminal-launch backends are welcome.
• Intrusion detection: Requires Python 3 (py on PATH) and OpenCV (pip install opencv-python) for webcam capture. If unavailable, everything else still works — you just won't get the photo.

The dashboard does not hot-reload. After editing extension.mjs you must restart your Copilot CLI host process. The chosen port also changes on every restart, so re-read ~/.copilot/session-dashboard-port after restarting.

See AGENTS.md for instructions to AI assistants contributing to this code.

MIT — see LICENSE.