Claude Usage Status Bar

Your Claude Code rate limits, always visible, without leaving the editor.

The Claude Code extension's chat panel does not render the statusLine setting. If you configured a status line for the terminal, it is simply invisible in the panel — there is no rendering code for it there at all. This extension closes that gap using VS Code's own status bar, so you can see how much headroom you have while you work.

✨ Features

📊 Status bar — always visible

Both rate-limit windows, refreshed every 60 seconds. The parenthesised figure is how long until the 5-hour window resets.

Severity follows whichever window is higher, so a quiet 5-hour window will not hide a nearly-exhausted 7-day one.

🔍 Details on hover

Your plan appears next to the title. It is detected from your local Claude Code account files; if that fails you are asked once and the answer is remembered.

🖱 Click to refresh

No waiting for the next poll. Clicking reuses an in-flight request rather than starting a second one, so impatient clicking cannot pile up processes.

🛟 Calm under failure

When a refresh fails, the last known numbers stay on screen instead of blanking out, and the severity colour is not escalated. A brief network blip should not make the status bar flicker or cry wolf. The failure is reported in the tooltip along with the time of the last successful update, so you can still tell when the numbers went stale.

📋 Requirements

This extension reads claude-dashboard's check-usage.js to get its numbers and ships none of its code. To install the plugin, run this in Claude Code:

/plugin install claude-dashboard

Without it, the status bar says ✻ ⚠ not installed and the tooltip tells you the same thing — it fails visibly rather than silently.

📦 Installation

From the Marketplace — search for Claude Usage Status Bar in the Extensions view, or:

code --install-extension barahana10.claude-code-usage-statusbar

From a VSIX — download a release and:

code --install-extension claude-code-usage-statusbar-0.1.3.vsix

From source:

git clone https://github.com/barahana25/Claude-Usage-Statusbar
cd Claude-Usage-Statusbar
npm install && npm test
npx vsce package

🖱 Usage

⚙️ Configuration

{
  // claude-dashboard caches API responses for 60 seconds, so a shorter
  // interval just returns the same values. 60 is the enforced minimum.
  "claudeUsageStatusBar.refreshSeconds": 120,

  // "auto" reads your local Claude Code account files and asks once if it
  // cannot tell. The plan only labels the tooltip — it never changes which
  // limits are displayed.
  "claudeUsageStatusBar.plan": "auto"
}

🔍 How it works

every 60s ──▶ resolve the newest installed claude-dashboard
                        │
                        ▼
              node <plugin>/dist/check-usage.js --json
                        │
                        ▼
              parse → fold into view state → render

The path is resolved on every refresh rather than cached at startup, so updating or uninstalling claude-dashboard is picked up on the next poll without reloading the window. Versions are ordered by comparing each component numerically — a plain string sort would rank 1.9.0 above 1.31.1.

Every failure mode — a missing plugin, a spawn failure, a non-zero exit, unparsable output, a timeout — is normalized into one result type, so rendering the status bar can never be interrupted by an exception. In-flight work is aborted when the extension shuts down, so no child process outlives it.

🔒 Privacy

Everything is local.

• The extension makes no network requests of its own and sends nothing anywhere.
• It runs check-usage.js as a child process; that plugin talks to Anthropic on your behalf, using credentials Claude Code already stores.
• It reads your Claude Code config files only to determine your plan, and only the fields that name it.

❓ Known limitations

Context-window usage for the current session (42K/200K) is not shown. Those numbers reach the terminal status line through a payload that Claude Code hands it on stdin, and nothing outside the CLI can tell which session a given editor window belongs to. Guessing would produce a number that looks authoritative and is quietly wrong, so it is left out.

Usage for other CLIs (Codex, Gemini, and so on) is fetched by the underlying plugin but is not displayed here. This extension is about Claude's limits.

🛠 Development

npm install
npm test        # compiles, then runs the suite
npx vsce package

Zero runtime dependencies — Node built-ins and the vscode API only. Five of the six source modules never import vscode, which is why almost all of the logic is covered by fast Node tests with no VS Code harness.

📄 License

MIT © barahana25

An unofficial, community-built extension. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Anthropic.