A menu-bar mind map for the chats you're farming out to AI

What it does

KIKUmap is a native Swift/AppKit menu-bar app that turns your Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, and Codex sessions into a mind map. Pinned chats line up in a column; you drag them onto topics you define, tag them, and colour them. The menu-bar icon shows a ring counting running chats, a red badge for finished-but-unread ones, and a ! when something needs your approval. It also tracks time worked, usage, and a timeline of past runs and scheduled tasks.

The interesting bit

The Claude desktop app has no public API, so KIKUmap reads its chat list through macOS Accessibility — screen-scraping with manners. Everything stays local in ~/Library/Application Support/, with zero network requests unless you opt into usage lookups (which borrow the sign-ins Claude Code and Codex already store, and could get blocked since neither company has blessed the approach).

Key highlights

• Keyboard-first editing: ⇥ subtopic, ⏎ sibling, ⌘Z undo, ⌘F search, space opens a chat
• Export each chat as Markdown files — summary, prompts, conversation, artifacts — importable into another Claude account
• Desktop widgets (macOS 14+) showing time worked and plan usage; statistics over 7–90 days
• Daily backups, PDF export of the map, light/dark themes, English and Chinese
• Plain Swift, no third-party code beyond Lucide icons; builds with just the Xcode command-line tools

Caveats

• Not notarized (no paid Apple developer account), so first launch requires the “Open Anyway” dance
• Fragile by design: a Claude or ChatGPT app update can break the Accessibility reading until KIKUmap catches up
• Claude chats are invisible when the window is closed or off the current desktop — running chats show “running?” meanwhile

Verdict

If you juggle multiple AI sessions daily and use a Mac, this is a genuinely useful supervisor’s chair. If you run one chat at a time, it’s a chrysanthemum watching you work.