Floating Bar vs Sidebar - Designing a macOS AI Agent That Stays Out of Your Way
Floating Bar vs Sidebar - Designing a macOS AI Agent That Stays Out of Your Way
Every AI desktop tool wants to live in your workspace permanently. Sidebars, docked panels, always-visible overlays. The assumption is that you need AI accessible at all times. In practice, you need it for 30 seconds every few minutes - and the rest of the time it is just eating screen real estate.
The Sidebar Problem
A sidebar consumes 300-400 pixels of horizontal space on every monitor. On a 13-inch MacBook, that is roughly 20% of your usable screen width. Permanently. Even when you are not using the AI tool at all.
Developers who split their screen between an editor and a terminal now have to squeeze both into 80% of the space - or constantly toggle the sidebar on and off, which defeats the purpose of having it always accessible.
The Floating Bar Approach
A floating bar activated by a hotkey solves both problems. Press the hotkey, the bar appears. Give your command, the agent executes, the bar dismisses. Your screen layout is untouched 95% of the time.
The key design details that make this work: the bar should appear near your cursor, not in a fixed position. It should accept natural language input immediately without requiring a click. And it should dismiss automatically after the agent confirms the action.
Why Position Matters
A sidebar forces you to shift visual focus to a fixed location. A floating bar appears where you are already looking. This sounds minor, but over hundreds of daily interactions, the cognitive overhead of context-switching to a sidebar adds up. Your eyes stay on your work, the bar comes to you, and it leaves when done.
For Fazm, we settled on a menu bar icon with a global hotkey. One keystroke to summon, one command to execute, automatic dismissal. The agent is always available but never in the way.
This post was inspired by a discussion on r/MacOS by u/Various.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.