A Windows WPF utility for monitoring and remote-controlling cmd.exe windows that run Claude Code sessions. It watches every open cmd window on selected drives, shows a live colored preview of the selected console, and lets you drive sessions without ever touching the windows themselves.

Not affiliated with Anthropic. This is an independent, third-party tool. "Claude" and "Claude Code" are trademarks of Anthropic; this project is not endorsed by or connected to Anthropic in any way.

CmdManager screenshot

Features

  • Live console preview — reads the target console's screen buffer (colors included) and renders it in the app; no focus stealing.
  • Busy/idle indicators — each cmd gets a red (working) or teal (idle) border by watching screen-buffer changes; a beep fires when a command you sent finishes.
  • Silent input — type a command in the app and it's injected straight into the target console via WriteConsoleInput; Up/Down cycles your recently sent commands, and a clipboard-paste fallback handles long text. Unicode (including Turkish characters) is preserved end to end.
  • One-click session actions — send cc to (re)start Claude Code in a window, switch a console to UTF-8 (chcp 65001), clone a cmd in the same directory, or close all tracked windows at once.
  • Auto-resume on usage limits — when Claude Code stops with "5-hour limit reached · resets 3pm" (or weekly / extra-usage variants), the app parses the reset time off the screen and automatically sends a configurable resume command (default devam et) once the limit lifts. It's heavily guarded against false positives: on-screen code/quotes don't trigger it, it won't type into a bare shell after Claude has exited, and it postpones if you're actively using that window. Toggle it and edit the message from the toolbar.
  • History & favorites — directories of closed cmds are recorded automatically (double-click to reopen and relaunch cc); pin favorite directories with custom labels.
  • Global hotkey — Ctrl+Alt+M toggles the window from anywhere.
  • English / Turkish UI — ships in English by default; switch to Turkish anytime with the 🌐 button (your choice is saved to settings).

Build

dotnet build -c Release

Publish a single-file exe:

dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false -p:PublishSingleFile=true -o publish

The app intentionally keeps running after its window is closed, which locks the exe — kill CmdManager from Task Manager before rebuilding.

Requirements

  • Windows 10/11, x64
  • .NET 8 Desktop Runtime
  • Runs elevated (requireAdministrator) — see Security & admin rights below
  • A cc command on PATH that launches Claude Code (the "open + cc" actions run it)

Security & admin rights

CmdManager requests administrator rights (the UAC prompt on every launch) for two reasons only:

  • ReadProcessMemory / NtQueryInformationProcess — to read another cmd's current working directory out of its PEB.
  • AttachConsole — to read and write other processes' console screen buffers.

It runs entirely locally, makes no network connections, and stores nothing outside %APPDATA%\CmdManager\. The full source is in this repository — please audit it before running an elevated binary. See SECURITY.md for how to report a vulnerability.

Known limitations

  • x64 only. Working-directory discovery reads the target process's PEB using hardcoded x64 offsets; an x86 build would read the wrong memory. These offsets track current Windows builds and could break on a future Windows version.
  • Only cmd windows whose current directory is on the drives listed in AllowedDrives (MainWindow.xaml.cs, default E: and F:) are shown — adjust to taste.
  • Console attachment is process-wide state, so all cross-process console reads/writes run serialized on the UI thread.

Notes

  • Settings, history (capped at 100 entries) and favorites live under %APPDATA%\CmdManager\ as JSON.
  • New cmds start with /K chcp 65001 >nul (UTF-8); the "open + cc" variants then cd /d "<path>" && cc.