Claude Floating Alert

When Claude Code needs an answer, it says so inside the VS Code window — which is no help once you have switched to another app. This extension shows the same event as a small alert drawn above every window, full-screen apps and other Spaces included: permission requests, questions, and finished tasks. A click on the alert brings up the project it came from.

macOS only, Apple Silicon.

The three alerts

Permission needed — Claude wants to run a tool. Stays on screen until you answer.

A question — AskUserQuestion is waiting for your choice. Also stays until you answer.

Task finished — closes itself after three seconds.

The alert has no buttons: a click anywhere on it opens the matching folder in VS Code and dismisses it. You never see one for a window you are already looking at.

How it works

1. On activation the extension copies the hook script and the alert binary into ~/.claude/floating-alert/ — a stable path that extension updates do not break.
2. The bell button in the status bar adds the hooks to ~/.claude/settings.json or removes them. A backup settings.json.floating-alert.bak is written before the first change.
3. Claude Code runs claude-floating-alert.js on an event; the script spawns the alert as a detached process and exits immediately, so the CLI never blocks.
4. Every VS Code window publishes its focus state to ~/.claude/floating-alert/focus/<pid>.json, and the hook writes live panel data to run/<session>.json. A window is matched to a session by VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI — the window's unique socket, shared with the terminals it spawns — falling back to a folder match when the session was not started from a terminal. That way a window only ever dismisses its own alerts.

Three events are wired: PermissionRequest, PreToolUse (matcher AskUserQuestion) and Stop. Hooks belonging to other extensions are left untouched — Claude Code runs every matching group.

What it reads, and what leaves your machine

Nothing leaves your machine. The extension makes no network calls of any kind: there is no telemetry, no crash reporting, no update check.

Locally it reads two things. Claude Code hands the hook the event payload — the tool name, the question text, the working directory. And to put the alert next to the right editor tab, the hook opens the session transcript at ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session>.jsonl and takes two values from it: the title Claude generated for the session, and the first message you sent. Both are compared against VS Code tab labels and then discarded. See sessionMarks for the exact code.

One thing worth knowing: the alert is drawn above every application, and it shows the folder name plus the tool or question text. On a shared screen or a recording, that is visible to everyone watching. Each alert kind has its own switch in the settings if you would rather keep one of them off.

Commands

• Claude Floating Alert: Toggle Hooks — same as the status bar bell
• Claude Floating Alert: Show Test Alert

Settings

Permission and question alerts ignore the timeout: they stay until you answer them or return to the window they came from.

Development

npm install
npm run watch          # TypeScript
npm run build:native   # rebuild bin/claude-alert from the Swift source
npm run package        # → claude-floating-alert-darwin-arm64-1.0.0.vsix

Building the binary needs the Xcode Command Line Tools. Users do not — the compiled binary ships inside the .vsix.

License

MIT