I work across a lot of different GitHub repos, and agents have made it a lot easier to produce code than to verify and merge it. I’ve found one of the best ways to keep things moving is to avoid building up too much of a backlog of PRs. I built prBar to show the open PR counts in my Mac’s menu bar, so I can see how much crud is accumulating and when to focus on clearing it.
This is a tiny project I built in ~20 minutes while I was testing Grok 4.5.
I use Peter Steinberger’s CodexBar to keep track of my AI subscription usage and wanted something similar to track my PRs.
prBar shows the open PR count for each public or private repo you track, in the order you select. It uses the GitHub CLI (gh) for authentication. Repos with no counted PRs stay out of the menu bar. Open the menu to see branch counts from GitHub and worktree counts from local clones. Open a repo’s submenu to see individual PRs, newest first, and jump to them on github.com. Dependabot PRs are listed separately and excluded from the menu-bar count by default.
Install
Requires macOS 14+, Swift 6.0 or later (via Xcode or the Command Line Tools), and the GitHub CLI. Install and authenticate gh with brew install gh && gh auth login, then run:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sburl/prBar/main/install.sh | bash
This clones the repo, builds the app, and installs it at ~/Applications/prBar.app. First launch opens Repos… so you can add owner/name or a github.com URL, set a two-letter abbreviation, and drag to reorder. Open at Login is in the menu.
The app bundle also includes prbar-cli if you want to use the counts in a script. Run it with ~/Applications/prBar.app/Contents/MacOS/prbar-cli.