Run multiple isolated * Claude profiles on macOS — each one its own Claude Desktop and its own paired Claude Code setup — and tell their windows apart at a glance.

Your normal Claude install is left alone. It stays as it is and keeps working normally; shannoncoat only adds profiles alongside it.

A menu-bar item allows quick switching and profile management.

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Note

shannoncoat started as the shell script in the first commit, written by hand. Claude built the GUI app out of it — most of the Swift, the icon, and this README — working from human direction, review, and dogfooding.

Requirements

• macOS 13 or later
• Claude Desktop

Install

1. Download shannoncoat.app.zip from the latest release.
2. Unzip it and move shannoncoat.app to /Applications or ~/Applications.
3. Open it. macOS will block the first launch, because the app isn't notarized. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, find the blocked item, and click Open Anyway.
4. When prompted, grant Accessibility. The window tags are drawn from Accessibility data and won't appear without it.

First run

With nothing running, shannoncoat offers a list of your profiles and starts whichever you tick. You can start several at once.

Everyday use

The menu bar shows a coloured dot per running profile — dot and name when only one is up, dots alone when there are more (hover for the names).

Open the menu and:

• Click a profile to switch to it. Every other running profile is quit first, so you end up with just that one — including when the profile you clicked is already up, in which case it's the neighbours that go.
• Shift-click a profile to open it alongside whatever is already running, or to bring its window forward if it's already up, leaving everything else where it is.

If you open alongside more often than you switch, Settings → Click a profile to swaps the two around.

A ⇆ marks the profile you last switched to. Close Profile quits one profile; Quit Claude quits all of them and leaves shannoncoat running. Manage Profiles… opens the main window.

Quitting Claude by hand, from the Dock, or via Force Quit is picked up within about a second — the menu bar always reflects what is actually running.

Window tags

Each managed Claude window carries a small tag in that profile's colour, so two otherwise identical windows are easy to tell apart.

Drag a tag anywhere on its window; each profile remembers where you put its own. If you'd rather have something smaller, Settings → Window tag → Colored dot replaces the name chip with a plain dot.

Profiles

default is your real, untouched Claude install. shannoncoat can start and stop it but never manages it, so it gets no tag and can't be deleted.

To add a custom isolated profile, open Manage Profiles… → + and enter a name. The directories are optional — leave them blank and the profile gets ~/.shannoncoat/data/<name>/app and ~/.shannoncoat/data/<name>/code. Point them anywhere you like if you'd rather keep a profile's data with a project.

Selecting a profile shows both paths, ready to copy.

Each profile is a small JSON file at ~/.shannoncoat/<name>.json, named after the profile. Two profiles may not share a directory — that would silently merge their Claude sessions, so shannoncoat refuses to start and tells you which files collide.

Deleting a profile removes only that pointer file. Its Claude data stays on disk, so you can recreate the profile later and pick up where you left off. If it's running, it's quit first.

Settings

• Launch at Login — start shannoncoat automatically.
• Click a profile to — whether plain click switches and Shift-click opens alongside, or the reverse.
• Window tag — name chip or coloured dot.
• Automatically check for updates — once a day at most.

Updates

shannoncoat compares its version against the one published on GitHub. The automatic check posts a quiet notification; Check for Updates… in Settings reports either way.

It never replaces itself. When a new version exists, download it from the releases page and swap the app in yourself.

Troubleshooting

The window tags don't appear. Almost always Accessibility. Check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.

If shannoncoat is listed and already ticked but the tags still don't show, select it, remove it with −, then add it back. This happens after replacing the app with a build that has a different code signature; the old entry stays visible but no longer applies, and toggling it off and on won't fix it.

Claude Desktop can't be found. shannoncoat looks in /Applications and ~/Applications. If yours is somewhere else, you'll be asked to locate it the first time you start a profile.

A profile won't quit. Claude was asked to quit and declined — usually its own "unsaved work" or "still generating" dialog. shannoncoat deliberately waits rather than killing Claude underneath it. Answer the dialog.

Build from source

Local builds require the Xcode Command Line Tools.

xcode-select --install

Then run the build script

./build.sh

The app is written to .build/shannoncoat.app; copy it to /Applications or ~/Applications.

One thing worth setting up: an unsigned local build gets a new code identity every time, which silently invalidates its Accessibility grant on each rebuild. .env.example walks through creating a self-signed certificate once so the permission survives.

Isolation

Important

Perfect isolation is not guaranteed. Claude and Claude Code can have functionally full disk access regardless of which profile it's running from, including access to default configuration folders.

Some Claude integrations — skills, plugins, etc — may also hardcode the ~/.claude path which may modify content in there.