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Meridian ships with a lightweight macOS menu bar tray app that lives in your system tray and gives you an at-a-glance view of whether the background daemons are healthy and what you’ve been working on today. It’s designed for the times you don’t want to context-switch to the full dashboard — a quick glance at the menu bar is enough to confirm Meridian is recording and to spot when something has stopped working.
The tray app is macOS only. The Linux and Windows builds of Meridian do not include it.

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What the tray shows

The tray icon reflects daemon health in real time. Open the popover to see:
  • Daemon status — whether the Rust ETL daemon is running, derived from the daemon_running field on /api/health (a launchd probe with a 3-second timeout).
  • Accessibility helper status — whether the a11y helper is currently trusted by macOS. An untrusted helper means window titles aren’t being captured.
  • Today’s top app — the app you’ve spent the most focused time in so far today, with elapsed time.
  • Pending worklog drafts — a count of drafts waiting on your review.
From the popover you can also:
  • Open the full dashboard at http://localhost:3000.
  • Trigger a worklog draft for today without leaving the menu bar.
  • Pause or resume the daemon.
The tray polls /api/health and the activity endpoints every 60 seconds. When the daemon goes down — or comes back online — you get a macOS notification so you don’t silently lose recording time.

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Installation and auto-start

The tray app is installed automatically by ./install.sh and meridian update. It’s registered as a LaunchAgent (com.meridiona.tray) so it starts on login alongside the rest of the stack — there’s no separate command to run. You can verify it’s loaded with: 
launchctl list | grep com.meridiona.tray
If you want to start, stop, or restart the tray independently of the other daemons: 
# Stop the tray
launchctl stop com.meridiona.tray

# Start it again
launchctl start com.meridiona.tray
Logs are written to ~/.meridian/logs/tray.log and ~/.meridian/logs/tray-error.log.

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When to use it

Reach for the tray when you want to:
  • Confirm Meridian is still recording without breaking flow to open a browser.
  • Get notified the moment the daemon stops (for example after a system update or permission revocation).
  • Kick off a worklog draft quickly at the end of the day or after a focused session.
For deeper analysis — timelines, per-session detail, the apps view — open the dashboard. The tray is intentionally minimal.

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Troubleshooting

Check that the LaunchAgent is registered and running:
launchctl list | grep com.meridiona.tray
If it’s missing, re-run the installer or reinstall just the tray daemon:
bash scripts/install-tray-daemon.sh
Then tail the log to confirm it started:
tail -f ~/.meridian/logs/tray.log
The tray reads daemon_running from /api/health, which probes launchd for com.meridiona.daemon. If the UI service is down or unreachable on http://localhost:3000, the tray can’t fetch health and falls back to a stopped state. Confirm the UI is up:
meridian status
curl -s http://localhost:3000/api/health
Restart the stack with meridian restart if the UI service isn’t running.
The tray polls every 60 seconds. If the popover shows stale numbers for longer than that, check the tray log for errors and confirm the dashboard is reachable:
tail -f ~/.meridian/logs/tray.log
curl -s http://localhost:3000/api/health | jq