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.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.