clawdbar

Claude usage in your menu bar — in Claude's own exact colors.

A tiny SwiftBar plugin that shows your Claude Code 5-hour and 7-day rate-limit usage in the macOS menu bar, as mini progress bars painted in Claude's official, pixel-perfect colors.

White text (so it blends in with your other menu-bar items) + a colored bar per window:

Usage	Bar color	Meaning
< 70%	🔵 blue #3A6DCB	normal
70–99%	🟡 gold #D1933C	approaching limit
100%	🔴 dark red #7F2C28	capped

These three hex values were sampled pixel-perfect from the official claude.ai usage screen — not guessed. The 70% line is exactly where Claude's own allowed_warning state kicks in.

Why "clawdbar"?

clawd is the internal pet-name for Claude buried in Claude Code's own source — the menu-bar text color token in there is literally called clawd_body. This plugin lives in your menu bar, so: clawdbar. 🐾

How it works

• Same data as Claude Code's /usage, straight from the official endpoint: GET https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage → five_hour / seven_day utilization + resets_at.
• Auth reuses your existing Claude Code OAuth token, read locally from the macOS Keychain (Claude Code-credentials). Nothing leaves your machine except the call to api.anthropic.com; the script writes no token to disk.
• A small Python/Pillow snippet draws the progress-bar PNG and hands it to SwiftBar via | image=.

Requirements

• macOS + SwiftBar (brew install --cask swiftbar)
• An active Claude Pro / Max subscription, logged in via Claude Code (claude)
• python3 with Pillow (pip3 install Pillow)

Install

brew install --cask swiftbar
pip3 install Pillow

mkdir -p ~/SwiftBarPlugins
cp clawdbar.5m.sh ~/SwiftBarPlugins/
chmod +x ~/SwiftBarPlugins/clawdbar.5m.sh

Then in SwiftBar → Change Plugin Folder… → pick ~/SwiftBarPlugins (SwiftBar is sandboxed, so it needs you to select the folder once to grant access). On first run, click Always Allow when macOS asks for Keychain access.

The 5m in the filename = refresh every 5 minutes. The usage endpoint rate-limits hard — don't go lower.

Notes

• Why an image instead of colored text? SwiftBar doesn't support 24-bit truecolor ANSI in menu-bar titles — a \033[38;2;r;g;bm sequence gets mis-parsed and can even break rendering. Plain text is stuck with the 16-color ANSI palette, which can't reproduce #3A6DCB & co. Drawing a PNG is the only way to hit the exact official colors.
• The dropdown shows each window's reset time + countdown and a Refresh now button.
• Behind a proxy / in a geo-blocked region? Anthropic returns forbidden / "Request not allowed" on direct connections from some regions, and SwiftBar doesn't inherit your shell's http(s)_proxy vars. The plugin reads your macOS system proxy (scutil --proxy) and routes the API call through it — so it just works as long as your VPN/proxy is set as the system proxy. Turn the proxy off and it falls back to a direct connection.
• Resilient to blips. A single failed poll (network hiccup, proxy not ready right after wake, an occasional 429) won't blank the bar: the fetch retries up to 3×, and if it still fails the plugin shows the last good value (dimmed) from a small cache (~/.cache/clawdbar/last.json) instead of an error glyph — with a "showing cached value" note in the dropdown. Only a cold failure with no cache shows Claude ❓.
• Tweak colors / thresholds / layout in draw_icon() inside the script.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.