Claude Status Bar

About

Claude Status Bar is a lightweight macOS menu bar app that shows Claude Code's live status. It displays an animated Claude icon while Claude is thinking or running a tool, a yellow dot when it's awaiting your permission, and the elapsed time of the current turn. It has no window and no dock icon, so you can tab away during a long thinking stretch and still see whether Claude is working, waiting on you, or done.

The app is installed with Homebrew (`brew install --cask claude-status-bar`) or by downloading a signed and notarized DMG from the releases page. Launching it once wires up the Claude Code hooks automatically, after which it starts itself whenever Claude Code runs and quits when no session is active. It works with the Claude Code CLI, the Claude Code tab in Claude Desktop, and the Claude Code extension in Cursor. When several sessions run at once, the menu bar shows the highest-priority one, so a session awaiting permission is never hidden behind one that is thinking.

From the menu you can toggle the timer and status text, choose among four animation styles (Spark, Clawd, Orbit, and a terminal glyph spinner), and set the icon color to orange or system-adaptive. The app requires macOS 12 or later, Claude Code, and Node.js. Its only network activity is a daily update check against GitHub's and Homebrew's public APIs.