Clawde

A desktop pet that acts out your Claude Code sessions.

Sessions run in windows you are not looking at. Clawde puts one small character above everything else, doing whatever the session that most wants you is doing: typing while it works, asking while it waits on you, dozing when there is nothing to say. Click it and you are in that session.

Download for macOS Star on GitHub
brew install --cask burakcokyildirim/tap/clawde
  • Free and open source
  • macOS 15 or newer
  • Signed and notarized
The pet with its speech bubble open over three sessions. The pointer moves onto the waiting session and the pet waits with a question mark, then onto the working one and it pulls out a laptop and types.

Six moods

It acts out the session

Every mood has its own animation, with an entrance and an exit, so the laptop is never dropped in mid-air. The pet stands for the session that most wants you: one waiting on you first, then an answer nobody has read, then work in progress. It hops when a session takes up something new.

Active: it pulls out a laptop and types
Waiting: it writes a question mark over its head
Unread: a speech bubble bobs beside its head
Compacting: it squashes down and kicks up dust
Idle: it dozes
Resting: it blinks, with no session running

Four characters

Pick one, or draw your own

Each is drawn frame by frame on a 20 × 16 canvas and scaled in whole points per pixel, so the art stays crisp at any size.

Claudie pulling out a laptop to type
Claudie pulls out a laptop and gets to work.
Nibble, its eyes turning into see-sawing braces
Nibble thinks with its eyes.
Quack inspecting the work through a magnifying glass
Quack listens while you explain.
Kernel popping out tiles of code
Kernel pops out bits of program.

Make your own. A character is one Swift file of pixel art written as letters. Open the repository in Claude Code and run /new-character: it draws one with you, shows you every mood animated and wires it into the app.

A cat that walks across the keyboard, an octopus typing on four keyboards at once, a coffee mug that drains while the context compacts: a few are waiting for someone to draw them.

Menu bar

Every session, one click away

Hover the pet and a bubble lists every session that is doing something; the menu bar has all of them. Click one and Clawde brings it forward: the right tab in iTerm2, Terminal or Ghostty, the right window in VS Code, Xcode or a JetBrains IDE, the right conversation in the Claude desktop app.

The menu bar list with four sessions, waiting, unread, active and idle, and the day's usage bar underneath

Under the hood

How it knows

A small plugin
A Rust daemon per session reads its transcript and writes the state to a file beside it, and the app hears about every change at once.
Unread, for the desktop app
For sessions in the Claude desktop app it can tell when Claude has answered and you have not looked yet.
Next to nothing
No timer runs while the pet is hidden or covered, and with Reduce Motion on each mood holds a single still frame.

On first launch Clawde offers to install its Claude Code plugin. Sessions report once they start again after that; the README has the details, including the way in for the Claude desktop app.