Claude Status Bar for macOS

Native macOS menu bar app showing Claude usage and Claude Code activity at a glance. A clean-room Swift port of the idea behind claude-status-bar-kde, with multi-account support.

Features

• Usage at a glance — 5-hour and 7-day utilization for the active Claude account in the menu bar, color-coded (green / yellow ≥50% / red ≥80%, configurable).
• Multi-account — discovers every account managed by cux under ~/.cux (falls back to ~/.claude/.credentials.json); per-account usage bars in the popover.
• Claude Code activity — Clawd shows what your sessions are doing right now (thinking, editing, running…), with playful verbs and elapsed timers, driven by Claude Code hooks + file watching (no polling loop).
• Settings — display style, poll interval, thresholds, per-account visibility, launch at login, hook install/remove.

Install

1. Prerequisites

   • macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
   • Claude Code installed, if you want the menu bar to show live session activity (step 4 below). The app also works purely as a usage monitor without it.
   • Command Line Tools only if you're building from source — no full Xcode install needed: xcode-select --install.

2. Get the app

   Download ClaudeStatusBar.dmg from Releases, open it, and drag ClaudeStatusBar.app to /Applications.

   To build from source instead (contributors, or Command-Line-Tools-only setups), see Build from source below, then:

   copy

   cp -R dist/ClaudeStatusBar.app /Applications/
   

3. First launch / Gatekeeper

   The app is self-signed (not notarized by Apple), so macOS quarantines it and the first launch is refused ("cannot verify" / "damaged") — expected either way you installed it. Right-click the app in Applications and choose Open (twice if needed), or clear the quarantine flag directly:

   copy

   xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ClaudeStatusBar.app
   

   The app lives in the menu bar only (no Dock icon) — look for its icon there after launch.

4. Enable activity tracking

   Settings → Claude Code tab → Install. This adds hook entries for SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit, PreToolUse, PostToolUse, Stop, and Notification to ~/.claude/settings.json (a timestamped backup is written first; running Install again is safe — it replaces its own prior entry rather than duplicating it). Remove deletes exactly what Install added.

5. Multi-account usage (optional)

   Install cux and add your accounts — the app reads account slots straight from ~/.cux (falling back to the single account in ~/.claude/.credentials.json). Each cux slot shows up as its own row in the popover with 5h/7d usage bars; click Switch to make a different slot active. If a row shows re-login needed, click Log in: for a cux slot this runs cux switch <slot> && cux /login, for the bare ~/.claude account it runs claude /login — either opens a terminal window to complete the OAuth flow.

6. Verify it works

   The menu bar label shows (depending on display style): activity text (e.g. "Editing… · 12s"), the Clawd icon, and your active account's 5-hour usage percentage. Click it to open the popover for per-account usage bars and active Claude Code sessions.

7. Uninstall

   Settings → Claude Code tab → Remove, quit the app (menu bar icon → popover → Quit), then delete it:

   copy

   rm -rf /Applications/ClaudeStatusBar.app
   

Build from source

Requires macOS 14+ and Command Line Tools (no Xcode needed).

make build   # debug build
make test    # unit + integration tests
make app     # dist/ClaudeStatusBar.app
make dmg     # dist/ClaudeStatusBar.dmg

make app signs the app with a self-signed "ClaudeStatusBar Local Signing" identity, generating it into your login keychain on first run if it doesn't already exist (scripts/ensure-signing-identity.sh). Keeping this identity stable across rebuilds — rather than ad-hoc signing, which re-derives its identity from the binary's own bytes every build — is what lets macOS Keychain "Always Allow" grants (e.g. for cux account credentials) survive rebuilding and reinstalling the app.

Security notes

• OAuth tokens are read from disk only at request time and sent only to api.anthropic.com. They are never logged, cached, or written elsewhere.
• The app is not sandboxed (it must read ~/.claude and ~/.cux).
• The hook binary always exits 0 and prints nothing, so it can never block or corrupt a Claude Code session.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the build/test/PR workflow, and CLAUDE.md if you're using Claude Code (or another AI coding agent) to work in this repo.

License

MIT. Clawd artwork from clawd-tank (MIT) — see LICENSE.clawd-tank.