Show HN: macOS menu bar gauges for your Claude Code quota

Posted by grzracz 7 days ago

Comments

Comment by tyleo 7 days ago

I recommend people just update their Claude Code status line so that changes like this are in Claude Code itself.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/love-letter-to-the-claude-code-do...

Comment by oefrha 7 days ago

My status line shows 5h and 7d quota usage among other things like model, context usage, git branch, etc. Unfortunately the whole status line disappears half of the time from CC’s broken ass UI.

Comment by grzracz 7 days ago

Personally I have multiple instances of Claude on my PC dedicated to different areas (split between my private subscription and my work one) and it is useful to see both at a glance. And I don't have to keep the terminal open to see how much time is left for quota to be reset. But for single-Claude users this is indeed a valid solution!

Comment by tyleo 7 days ago

I also use multiple. Your statusline is per Claude session so it can show separate quotas/file info/context use/etc.

It’s just a script you write to modify the last line of the Claude Code program.

Comment by BowBun 7 days ago

I use codeburn, has both terminal and menu bar versions. Works quite well - https://github.com/getagentseal/codeburn

Comment by adithyaharish 5 days ago

Looks good, I would also recommened Ruflo, it does the same but also does agent orchestration and reduce spend in claude code, I have used for more than3 months, works quite well for me

Comment by artdigital 7 days ago

> curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grzegorz-raczek-unit8/clau... | bash

Can we stop with this way of installing things? This is already on brew and it’s a menu bar app. Just let me download it instead of executing some arbitrary bash script

When did this trend start?

Comment by bityard 7 days ago

I need to turn this into a blog post at some point:

Some of my early bad experiences with Linux arose because I installed software in ways that broke the system quite impressively. This taught me that with most Linux systems, you are not really supposed to just download random packages and shoe-horn them into your system. Or blindly compile and sudo make install things that could conflict with already-installed software.

The curlpipe pattern feels like a return to YOLO'ing your software installations, like the bad old Windows days where any INSTALL.EXE could overwrite another program's DLLs, wherever they lived on the disk. I trust the developers of my operating system to know what they are doing when they package software for it because most Linux distro communities have a vetting or code review process. I even sometimes trust people and projects who build their own packages for my distro and host them in their own third-party repo. Because that alone shows they probably have learned the bare minimum of things necessary to not break their users' systems.

But a curlpipe script? In my experience, the percentage of developers on GitHub who can write decent Python or Javascript code, and yet don't understand the basic concepts of The Unix Way and how to write safe, portable shell scripts is Very High. I am not going to hand control of my computer over to a random shell script on the Internet, end of story. If your program is any good, provide some generic hand-written instructions on how to build and/or install it, and I will follow those so that I can vet or modify each step as needed. I don't have time in my life to code review your shell script for a project that I was only mildly interested in to begin with.

Comment by grzracz 7 days ago

While I agree it's not super safe, even CC is installed this way: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart

Comment by max8539 7 days ago

Agree, and a lot of software on Mac tends to do the same thing: Codex, Claude Code, and so on. Fortunately, it’s just one of many options, and we can use Homebrew in 95% of cases.

P.S. Installing Homebrew is also officially done by running a shell script from GitHub.

Comment by VladVladikoff 7 days ago

Funny you should mention homebrew in this complaint.

Comment by rippeltippel 7 days ago

I use CodexBar, which supports more providers: https://github.com/steipete/codexbar

Comment by cpursley 7 days ago

Something has gone haywire with that one recently and it constantly freezes and crashes.

Comment by justAnotherHero 7 days ago

I've forked it so that I can see the old cursor 500 requests plan and haven't merged any of their changes after that for the last few months.

Seems to me the way to go with these apps that keep pushing daily updates.

Comment by grzracz 7 days ago

Wasn't aware this exists, good one!

Comment by fosron 7 days ago

CodexBar seems to do that good enough (and supports Codex), plus https://github.com/daniel3303/ClaudeCodeStatusLine this also adds data straight into CC

Comment by 7 days ago

Comment by max8539 7 days ago

Created the same tool some time ago for Codex and Claude code: showing percents for both in the menu bar and detailed stats when you click on it. Using it literally every day, feel free to try: https://github.com/max2697/RateLimited Feedback greatly appreciated!

Comment by navels 7 days ago

lol how many of these things are there. I've been using https://github.com/f-is-h/usage4claude which includes Codex usage (I use Claude and Codex).

Comment by tskulbru 7 days ago

Im using https://github.com/mryll/claudebar myself on my Linux desktop setup using Hyprland and Waybar. Will try this one out on my laptop though!

Comment by linsomniac 7 days ago

I had Claude throw together one for my NixOS setup with Sway and Waybar: https://github.com/linsomniac/claude-usage-waybar

Comment by smy-hn 7 days ago

[dead]

Comment by cute_boi 7 days ago

What is benefit of this over https://github.com/steipete/codexbar?

Comment by grzracz 7 days ago

It's literally a single file that only supports multiple Claude instances :) so I guess simplicity

Comment by ceritium 7 days ago

I made recently a similar thing https://jmkr.es/claude-usage/

Comment by quietswami 7 days ago

Great Job! Just last week finished a very similar project to your own, but yours adds much more detail.

Comment by giancarlostoro 7 days ago

Honestly drives me crazy that CC doesnt show this on the bottom status bar a simple percentage “Weekly Quota Left: 99%” would be useful. Also noticed and idk if it was me or some mishap, a lot of my Claude sessions were not autocompacting, maybe its /loops fault not sure, but it made sense why I finally reached my weekly limit so insanely quickly recently.

Comment by kaliara 7 days ago

I wanted the same thing and recently saw this blog post on how to customize the bottom status bar: https://www.aimhuge.com/blog/claude-code-status-line.

I now show my current context window, five-hour quota, weekly quota, current branch and current PR.

It's quite handy!

Comment by Doublon 7 days ago

Their documentation explains how to customize CC statusline and display the quotas: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/statusline#rate-limit-usage

Comment by devsda 7 days ago

From their perspective, they don't want

1. Standard tier users increasing their usage just to minimize "wasted" token credits.

2. Higher tier users with extra usage enabled to use and pay for those extra tokens instead of planning to stay within limits.

Comment by 7 days ago

Comment by giancarlostoro 7 days ago

I just want to know if my next prompt is about to eat shit at the last token. The number of times it like half works on something and falls apart halfway through.

Comment by xienze 7 days ago

You likely still wouldn't be able to figure that out even if you had a percent usage view available. Will your request take 1K tokens or 10K? Who knows! That's the magic of non-deterministic black boxes.

Comment by CPLX 7 days ago

Casinos don't have clocks in them.

Comment by grzracz 7 days ago

Doesn't it autocompact only if it is about to run out of context? On these newer models the context is 1M tokens so it's quite difficult to reach. I run compacts manually when I stop in a good place and tokens are over 300k

Comment by giancarlostoro 7 days ago

1m is too high, they used to autocompact a little too soon, maybe I tweaked defaults, it was kind of annoying, 200k tokens is too soon for me, I feel like the sweet spot is around 400k tokens.

Funnily enough Groks API charges less when you are below 400k tokens.

Half a million can get you reasonably far with enough of your codebase within the models context window.

I lowkey blame the 1m context window as the start of Anthropics worse woes earlier this year.

Comment by conception 7 days ago

You can change your compaction token limit to 400k if you want.

CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE

And

CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW

Comment by ab-dm 7 days ago

The Claude app has a usage indicator when you switch to code mode. I’ve been using this more and more now that their sandbox functionality has Improved.

Comment by sturges 7 days ago

[dead]

Comment by 7 days ago

Comment by mahoro 7 days ago

Unexpected: reading the code was entertaining (no sarcasm): pixel fonts, png encoder.

Comment by bicepjai 7 days ago

Codexbar app and ccstatusline

Comment by maximedeco 6 days ago

Looks nice but yes, I find it easier to show it in the status line

Comment by dmzxnico 6 days ago

OpenUsage is really nice for this kind of things.

Comment by tuo-lei 7 days ago

how does this pull the quota data? reading from the CC process output or is there an actual API for it?