System tray and daemon
The tray icon that stays after you close the window, and the optional background daemon that keeps workers running.
AgentGrid installs a system tray icon (menu bar on macOS, notification area on Windows, panel indicator on Linux) so the app has a home when the main window is closed. It's also the front door to the optional background daemon.
The tray menu
Right-click (or left-click on macOS) the tray glyph to open the menu:
- Show AgentGrid — brings the main window forward, creating it if you'd closed it.
- Hide Window — appears only when the window is currently visible.
- Daemon: … — a status row (see below). Only shown when the daemon is enabled.
- Quit Daemon — gracefully stops the background daemon. Enabled only when the client is connected to it.
- Quit AgentGrid — closes the app. If the daemon is running the label becomes Quit AgentGrid (daemon keeps running) so you know your workers survive.
On Windows, left-clicking the tray icon also surfaces the main window directly. The glyph auto-adapts to light/dark menu bars.
The background daemon
Long-running workers used to die the moment you quit the app. The daemon is an opt-in background process that owns PTYs and worker child processes independently of the main window, so you can close (or crash) AgentGrid without losing your agents' work.
The daemon is off by default. Turn it on by launching AgentGrid with the AGENT_GRID_DAEMON=1 environment variable — the tray menu will then show the daemon rows and the "daemon keeps running" quit label.
The status row reports one of:
- Daemon: connected · port <port> · pid <pid> — the app is talking to a live daemon.
- Daemon: connecting… — handshake in progress.
- Daemon: running (pid <pid>) · not connected — a detached daemon from a previous run is still alive but the current app hasn't adopted it yet.
- Daemon: not running — no daemon process is up.
Use Quit Daemon when you want to stop everything cleanly; use Quit AgentGrid (with the "daemon keeps running" suffix) when you just want the window gone but the agents to keep churning.
Next
- Agents and workers — what actually runs inside a worker pane.
- Panes — the canvas surface every agent runs in.