When you ask users why they prefer Claude and Claude Code over the competition, you’ll hear the usual answers: best at coding, outputs feel more thoughtful, the personality just clicks, and so on. While all of these are true, the reason that has kept me loyal is one you won’t find a lot of people talk about: the community.
There’s this huge, constantly-building community around Claude Code, and for every limitation you run into, odds are someone’s already hit the same wall, gotten annoyed enough to fix it, and shipped a free tool so the rest of us don’t have to. That’s exactly how I stumbled onto one that lives in my menu bar and solves one of Claude Code’s most annoying habits.
Claude Code doesn’t really tell you when it’s done
Or when it needs you
If you’ve been using Claude Code (or any AI-assisted terminal coding agent), you’re likely used to hitting Enter on a prompt and then just watching the terminal. You wait for the wall of text to stop scrolling, wait for the thinking indicator to settle, wait for that little prompt to reappear so you know it’s your turn again. For a single session or a quick task you want to get done with, that’s fine. However, the moment you try to step away and do something else, you lose all visibility into what’s happening. I’m not talking about physically stepping away and making a quick coffee to get a break from your screen. I mean the completely normal thing of tabbing over to your browser to check your email, search up some documentation, reply to a Slack message, or fire off a second Claude Code session in another window while the first one grinds through its task.
I added one line to my Claude prompts and stopped getting generic answers
One question from Claude was worth more than ten better prompts from me
The instant Claude Code isn’t the thing you’re actively staring at, it practically goes dark on you. It could be halfway through the job, it could’ve finished a full minute ago while you weren’t looking, or it could be sitting there completely frozen because it’s waiting on you to approve a single command. If you’re on macOS, you might see your terminal icon jump up and down in the Dock, but eventually the bouncing stops, and even while it lasts, it only tells you that something is going on. It doesn’t really tell you what’s going on.
Did Claude finish? Did it run into an error? Is it waiting on a permission prompt? You’ve still got to drop whatever you’re doing, click back into the terminal, and actually read the screen to find out. If you’ve got more than one session running, the Dock is even less help, since a single bouncing icon can’t tell you which of your terminals is the one that actually needs you!
Right when you can see it
When scrolling on Reddit, I came across a tool called claude-status-bar, and it turned out to be the exact fix for the problems I mentioned above! It’s a tiny macOS menu bar app built by a solo developer that shows you Claude Code’s live status right up in your menu bar. This way, you never have to tab back into the terminal just to check what’s going on! You can find it on this GitHub repository, and all you need to do is install it once, and it wires up the Claude Code hooks for you automatically. From there, it just works.
While Claude is thinking or running a tool, the icon animates, and there’s a little live timer counting up so you know exactly how long the current turn has been going. You’ll also find that the thinking words Claude uses (like percolating, manifesting, cooking, etc) in place of plain Thinking... are all baked in too! This means the menu bar matches the personality of the terminal you’re used to.
The second Claude Code stops to ask for permission, that icon switches to a paused yellow dot with Awaiting permission written. That’s the exact scenario I described earlier, where you come back after five minutes to find Claude never moved past step one. Now I just glance up, see the yellow dot, and know instantly that it’s waiting on me. When everything’s idle and there’s nothing to do, the icon simply rests on the Claude logo.
The tool handles multiple sessions really well too. If you’ve got a few Claude Code sessions running at once, say, a couple of terminals plus the desktop app — the menu bar surfaces the highest-priority one, so a session that’s waiting on your permission never gets buried behind one that’s just thinking.
Click the icon, and you get a dropdown listing every live session, and clicking any of them jumps you straight to it: terminal sessions bring their terminal window to the front, desktop sessions focus the Claude app. That’s the multi-session blind spot from earlier, solved!
There’s no setup required either
With a few Claude Code tools I’ve installed, there’s been a lot of setup I’ve needed to do manually. Fortunately, there’s absolutely none of that here, and the tool is about as close to zero-setup as it gets!
- Developer
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Anthropic PBC
- Price model
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Free, subscription available
Claude is an advanced artificial intelligence assistant developed by Anthropic. Built on Constitutional AI principles, it excels at complex reasoning, sophisticated writing, and professional-grade coding assistance.