MCPBoltBar — the menu bar app

MCPBoltBar is a native macOS app that lives in your menu bar. It gives you a full GUI for everything the CLI does, plus always-on health monitoring and a coverage matrix. Click the bolt icon at any time to see the state of your MCP servers across every tool.

The four tabs

By App

The default view. Every AI tool MCPBolt knows about appears as a collapsible card. Expand a card to see the MCP servers installed for that tool. Each server row shows:

A toggle pill (green = enabled, red = disabled)
A health dot (green / amber / red / grey — see Health status)
The server name and transport type (Local or Remote)
Quick-action buttons for Edit and Remove

Tools that MCPBolt detects on your machine are shown with their real server counts. Tools not installed are listed but grayed out.

Coverage

A matrix view: servers on the left, tools across the top. Each cell shows whether that server is installed in that tool. Missing coverage is immediately obvious — a gap in a row means a server isn't wired into that tool yet. Click any gap to add the server to that tool in one action.

You can hide columns for tools you don't use. The hidden state persists across sessions.

Projects

Manage per-repository MCP configs — Claude Code's .mcp.json, VS Code's .vscode/mcp.json, and similar project-scoped files. See Projects tab for the full walkthrough.

Settings

App-level preferences: launch at login toggle, theme, default target pre-selections, and links to documentation and GitHub.

Toggle on / off

The green/red pill on each server row enables or disables that server for that specific tool without removing it. When you disable a server, MCPBolt comments out or temporarily moves the entry in the config file so the tool ignores it — but the configuration is preserved and restored immediately when you re-enable.

This is useful when a server is causing startup slowdowns or errors: disable it in one click, then re-enable when you're ready.

ℹ

Per-tool toggle. Toggling a server in one tool does not affect other tools. You can have a server enabled in Claude Desktop but disabled in Cursor independently.

Live health status

MCPBoltBar checks the health of every registered server once per minute. The health dot next to each server name reflects the latest result. See Health status for the full explanation of what each color means and how checks are performed.

Sync across apps

From any server row in the By App tab, open the context menu and choose Sync to other tools. MCPBolt shows a picker of all other tools and writes the server's config to every one you select — translating the format automatically. This is the same operation as running npx mcpbolt and picking targets, but done from the GUI without re-pasting anything.

Edit in place

Click the edit button on any server row to open a form showing the server's current command, args, env, and URL. Make changes and click Save — MCPBolt writes the updated config using the same merge-and-backup approach as the CLI. No manual JSON editing, no backslash escaping.

💡

Env vars. Environment variable values are shown as editable text fields. If a value looks like a secret, treat the config file as the security boundary — see Security.

Full-screen dashboard

Click Open Dashboard from the menu bar popover (or the toolbar icon in Settings) to expand MCPBoltBar into a full resizable window. The dashboard shows the same four tabs with more room — useful for the Coverage matrix or when managing many servers.

Launch at login

In the Settings tab, toggle Launch at login to have MCPBoltBar start automatically when you log in to your Mac. It starts minimized to the menu bar and runs silently in the background, keeping health status current without any interaction.