Finding your way around

BuildCaptain has two faces: the always-available menu bar popover for a quick glance, and the full dashboard window for digging in.

The menu bar

The menu bar icon reflects your pinned pipelines at all times — an anchor when all is well, animated while builds run, and clearly marked when something failed. Click it to see every pinned pipeline with its latest run, one-click Run buttons, and a shortcut into the app. In Settings you can choose whether the Run button opens the parameter form, runs with defaults, or offers both.

The dashboard sidebar

• Activity — everything happening on the server right now: running builds, the queue, and recent build history. Agent approval requests appear here too.
• Agents — your Jenkins nodes with executor usage and offline states.
• Pinned — your pinned pipelines with live status.
• Pipelines — browse the server's jobs, including folders and multibranch projects. The pin icon on any pipeline row adds it to your pinned list.
• At the bottom: Logs (in-memory debug log), AI Agents (agent access settings), and Settings.

Use the arrow keys to move through the sidebar like any Mac list.

The pipeline view

Select a pipeline and you get its run history in a picker, the stage graph, and the action buttons: Run (⌘↩), Stop (⌘.) while a build is running, Rerun for finished builds, and a refresh button (⌘R). Click any stage to open its console output in a resizable drawer — details in The stage graph and logs.

Settings worth knowing

• Launch at login and Dock icon — run BuildCaptain as a pure menu bar app or a regular one.
• App icon — sailboat, anchor, or captain.
• Notifications — failure/recovery alerts for pinned pipelines and completion alerts for builds you started.
• Build history limit — how many recent builds the Activity page collects.