sidecar

README

sidecar

Sidecar is your AI's TODO list and scratchpad for its human companion: a live-updating, scrollable markdown viewer for a narrow terminal pane. Built to sit beside a Claude Code session and watch the REVIEW.md queue Claude maintains during long working sessions.

sidecar [file.md]        # default: ./SIDECAR.md
sidecar init [file.md]   # scaffold the file, optionally keep it out of git

sidecar init writes a starter SIDECAR.md and, inside a git repo, offers to keep it out of version control — via .git/info/exclude (local only, shared across worktrees) or .gitignore (committed) — since a personal scratchpad usually shouldn't be tracked.

What it does

• Renders markdown with glamour and re-renders the moment the file changes (fsnotify on the parent directory, 100 ms debounce — survives atomic rename-swaps, deletes, and recreates; waits politely if the file doesn't exist yet).
• Scrolls: mouse wheel, j/k, arrows, PgUp/PgDn, g/G for top/bottom. Scroll position is preserved across reloads.
• r forces a reload, q quits.
• Re-renders on terminal resize at pane width − 2 — it never renders wider than the pane.
• Thin status bar: filename · "updated 12s ago" · scroll %.

Rendering style

The glamour style is embedded in the binary (style.go), tuned for a narrow pane on a dark background:

• Compact: at most one blank line between blocks, no margins, no trailing-space padding.
• All colors are hex (truecolor), never 256-palette indexes — Ghostty remaps palette indexes.
• Links are teal (leaning blue-cyan) and underlined; bare URLs stay intact on their own line so Ghostty's link detection makes them clickable.
• H1 is a black-on-lavender badge; H2 is muted amber with a ▍ prefix; bold stays default-foreground bold.

To tune colors, edit the color… constants at the top of style.go (links are colorLink) and rebuild.

Install

Prebuilt binary (no Go needed)

Grab the archive for your OS/arch from the latest release, extract, and move sidecar onto your PATH. For example, on Apple Silicon:

curl -sSL https://github.com/than/sidecar/releases/latest/download/sidecar_$(uname -s)_$(uname -m).tar.gz | tar xz
mv sidecar ~/.local/bin/

(macOS uname -m reports arm64; Linux x86-64 reports x86_64 — both match the release archive names.)

With Go

One command (needs Go 1.26+):

go install github.com/than/sidecar@latest

That installs sidecar into $(go env GOPATH)/bin (default ~/go/bin) — make sure it's on your PATH. To install straight into a dir that already is, set GOBIN:

GOBIN=~/.local/bin go install github.com/than/sidecar@latest

From source

git clone https://github.com/than/sidecar && cd sidecar
go build -o sidecar
ln -sf "$(pwd)/sidecar" ~/.local/bin/sidecar   # any dir on your PATH

Test

go test ./...

testdata/REVIEW.md is a representative fixture: h1, emoji-marked h2 sections (🔴🟡🟢✅), bold, bullets, bare URLs, and a 300-line body for scroll testing.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.