bg-agents-panel

A Hermes Agent plugin that adds a live panel to the TUI showing running background agents and processes.

What it does

Hermes' status bar already shows counts (⛓ N subagents, ⚙ N processes) and /agents dumps a one-shot text listing. This plugin goes further — it injects a live auto-updating widget above the status bar that shows each running background agent/process individually, with its goal, uptime, and status.

  ⛤ Research GRPO papers and write summary    1m23s
  ⚙ npm run dev                                 45s

The panel:

• Only appears when something is running — collapses to 0 height when idle, zero visual clutter
• Updates live on every TUI render tick (no polling, no background thread)
• Shows up to 6 lines max so it never eats your screen
• Uses ⛓ for subagent delegations and ⚙ for background terminal processes, matching the existing status bar icons
• Color-coded with the same styles as the status bar (gold bold for active items, dim gray for metadata)

Installation

From this repo

git clone https://github.com/ilyakooo0/bg-agents-panel.git
cp -r bg-agents-panel ~/.hermes/plugins/bg-agents-panel

Enable the plugin

Add bg-agents-panel to plugins.enabled in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

plugins:
  enabled:
    - bg-agents-panel

Or use the CLI:

hermes plugins

Restart Hermes

# In an existing session:
/quit

# Relaunch:
hermes

Verify it loaded:

HERMES_PLUGINS_DEBUG=1 hermes plugins list | grep bg-agents

How it works

The plugin monkey-patches HermesCLI._get_extra_tui_widgets() — a designed extension point in Hermes' TUI layout — to inject a prompt_toolkit Window widget between the spacer and the status bar.

The widget's content and height are driven by callbacks that query two module-level registries on every render tick:

• tools.async_delegation.list_async_delegations() — background delegate_task subagents
• tools.process_registry.list_sessions() — background terminal processes

Both are in-memory, lock-protected, and return in microseconds. No network calls, no background threads, no I/O — the panel is effectively free.

When no background agents or processes are running, the height callback returns 0 and the widget is invisible.

Requirements

• Hermes Agent v0.18.2+ (uses _get_extra_tui_widgets extension hook)
• Linux or macOS (TUI mode)

License

MIT