What My Claude Code Status Line Tells Me

Row 1 — where am I?

~/dev/aimhuge (main) [opus] — the working directory, the git branch, and the model I'm on. Then the session's name (here, the task in flight: "Invert menu order in projects page"). One glance answers "which repo, which branch, which model, doing what."

Row 2 — how much runway?

ctx:65% — how full the context window is. When this creeps toward 100%, a compaction is coming, so it's my cue to wrap up a thread or hand off.

tok:351.5k — tokens used this session, and +1681/−676 — the size of the diff Claude has produced so far. A quick gut-check on how much has actually changed.

5hr:95% reset 10pm · 7d:95% — the part I care about most: how much of my 5-hour and weekly rate-limit budget is left, and when the window resets. Green means plenty; it shades to red as I burn it down. No more surprise "you've hit your limit" mid-task.

Row 3 — what can it do without asking?

▸▸ bypass permissions on (shift+tab to cycle) — the current permission mode. Handy to keep visible so "why didn't it ask me?" is never a mystery.

How it works

Claude Code pipes a JSON blob (cwd, model, session, token and cost data) to whatever command you point statusLine at. Mine is a small shell script that reads that JSON with jq and prints two ANSI-colored rows.

// ~/.claude/settings.json
"statusLine": {
  "type": "command",
  "command": "bash ~/.claude/statusline-command.sh"
}

The script colors each percentage by how much budget remains — green when there's room, red when there isn't — so the line reads at a glance without me having to parse numbers. It's the cockpit I didn't know I needed.