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 — add accounts natively (Add Account → claude /login) and switch the active one in-process from the popover, each with its own 5h/7d usage bars.
• 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:

   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:

   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)

   The app manages multiple accounts natively — switching swaps the live Claude Code-credentials Keychain item and ~/.claude.json's oauthAccount block itself, with a per-account Keychain-backed vault for the credentials of every account that isn't currently active. To add another account, click Add Account in the popover, complete the claude /login flow it opens in a terminal window, and the newly-logged-in account is captured and added as its own row.

   Each account shows up as its own row in the popover with 5h/7d usage bars; click Switch to make a different account active in-process. If a row shows re-login needed, click Log in — this switches that account live first (so the credentials claude /login renews belong to the right account, not whatever was active before), then 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:

   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 the live Claude Code-credentials item) 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).
• The app re-asserts its trust on the live Claude Code-credentials Keychain item once per launch (skipped once already trusted), so macOS's "Always Allow" grant survives across relaunches instead of re-prompting.
• 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.