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. The parenthesised figure is how long until the 5-hour window resets; it counts down every minute, while Anthropic is asked for new numbers every five.

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, and asks Anthropic at most once a minute, so impatient clicking cannot get you rate-limited.

🛟 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

Nothing else — no plugin, no CLI tool, no runtime dependencies. The extension reuses the login Claude Code already stores, so if you use Claude Code on this machine, it works as soon as it is installed.

Without a login, the status bar says ✻ ⚠ not signed in and the tooltip tells you how to sign in — 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-0.2.0.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

{
  // Anthropic's usage endpoint rate-limits aggressively, and polling every
  // 30-60 seconds is known to trip it. 60 is the enforced minimum.
  "claudeUsageStatusBar.refreshSeconds": 600,

  // "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 ──▶ read Claude Code's login (keychain on macOS, .credentials.json elsewhere)
                        │
                        ▼
              shared cache fresh? ──yes──▶ use it
                        │ no
                        ▼
              GET api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage
                        │
                        ▼
              save to shared cache → fold into view state → render

The login is read on every tick rather than cached at startup, because Claude Code rotates the token when it renews the login; the next tick simply picks up the new one.

Every open window shares one cache, so three windows make one request between them, not three. The endpoint answers 429s with retry-after: 0, which is no help, so on a 429 the extension works out its own wait — 2 minutes, doubling up to 30 — and records it in the shared cache so every window honours it. Meanwhile the last known numbers stay on screen, including across a window reload.

Every failure mode — a missing login, an expired token, a network error, a timeout, an HTTP error, an unexpected body — is normalized into one result type, so rendering the status bar can never be interrupted by an exception. The in-flight request is cancelled when the extension shuts down.

🔒 Privacy

• The extension makes one kind of network request: GET https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage, authenticated with the OAuth token Claude Code already stores. It talks to nothing else.
• The token is read, sent to Anthropic, and never written anywhere. The shared cache (in VS Code's storage for this extension) holds only the usage numbers and a truncated SHA-256 hash of the token, used to notice when you sign in as someone else.
• It never renews or modifies your login. When the token expires, it waits for Claude Code to renew it.
• 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.

Anthropic's usage endpoint rate-limits aggressively, and once a token is limited it can stay that way for half an hour or more. Other tools that poll the same endpoint with your login (a status line plugin, say) count against the same limit. The extension backs off and keeps the last numbers on screen, but it cannot make the endpoint answer sooner.

An expired login is not renewed. Claude Code renews its token whenever you use it; if you have not used it for a while, the tooltip says the login expired until you next do.

🛠 Development

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

Zero runtime dependencies — Node built-ins and the vscode API only. Seven of the eight 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.