A zsh hook for command status in the sidebar (not just agents)

[rashpile]

agterm's shipped shell integration lights the sidebar glyph while a coding agent runs. I wanted the same
signal for ordinary commands, so I wired up a small zsh hook that drives agtermctl session status from
any command's lifecycle:

• dim glyph while a command runs
• green when it finishes clean, amber when it exits non-zero
• the finish colour uses --auto-reset, so you only see it on a tab you're not looking at — switch to
  that tab and it clears

The case it's for is walking away: start a build or a test run, move to another tab, and the first one
goes green or amber when it's done.

How it works: preexec sets active; precmd reads $? and the command's duration and sets
completed / blocked, or clears back to idle for anything under ~10s (and for agent and interactive
commands, so it stays out of the shipped integration's way). Both status writes are synchronous — two
async writes from back-to-back commands can arrive out of order and leave a stuck glyph.

I also give the command badges slightly lighter tints than the default active/completed colours, so a
running command reads differently from a running agent in the sidebar.

Script and a longer writeup: https://github.com/rashpile/agterm-experimental/tree/main/shell/zsh

[rashpile]

A few changes since the first post:

• .badgeignore / .badgeallow, one command per line. The second is an allowlist: put anything in it
  and only those commands badge.
• claude is skipped by default — Claude Code's own hooks drive that glyph, so badging it just fought
  them.
• Success uses a light green tint now instead of the default, so a finished command doesn't read as an
  agent's completed turn.
• AGTERM_BADGE_DISABLE=1 turns it off live in the current shell.

Also fixed a restart bug: every session came back with a running badge that never cleared. Two causes.
I badged in preexec but only decided what to skip in precmd — and a restored long-running command
(claude, ssh, a TUI) never reaches a prompt, so nothing ever cleared it. On top of that, agterm
restores the command shell-quoted — preexec gets 'claude' '--resume' '…' — so matching
^(claude|…) against the raw line never matched. Normalising the first word sorts both:

words=(${(z)1}); w=${${(Q)words[1]}:t}   # 'claude' -> claude ; /path/to/claude -> claude

The quoting only bites after a restart, since typing claude … by hand is unquoted. Worth knowing if
you hook preexec for anything else.

Same link: https://github.com/rashpile/agterm-experimental/tree/main/shell/zsh

[umputun]

this is really a cool idea!