Claude Floating Alert

When Claude Code or Codex 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, and the chat with it.

macOS only, Apple Silicon.

The three alerts

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

A question — AskUserQuestion (request_user_input in Codex) is waiting for your choice. Also stays until you answer.

Task finished — closes itself after three seconds.

A click anywhere on the alert opens the matching folder in VS Code and dismisses it. You never see one for a window you are already looking at.

An alert that waits for an answer has two buttons in its corner: × closes it, and the arrow folds it into a one-line strip at the corner of the screen — the request stays open, the alert only gets out of the way — and back. A long command unfolds on a click on its text, up to most of the screen's height, and scrolls beyond that.

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 and, where Codex is set up, to ~/.codex/hooks.json — or removes them. A .floating-alert.bak backup of each file is written before the first change.
3. The agent 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. Codex registrations pass --agent codex, which is what names the agent on the alert.
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 per agent: PermissionRequest, PreToolUse (matcher AskUserQuestion, request_user_input for Codex) and Stop. Hooks belonging to other extensions are left untouched — both agents run every matching group.

Codex adds one step of its own: it runs a hook only after you have trusted it, and skips new or changed ones silently. Open the Codex panel, go to Hooks in its settings, and trust the three entries — the extension reminds you once, right after it writes them.

What decides the alert is the window, not the chat: if a window with that folder is in front, you are taken to be looking at it. No extension can see which chat a side bar holds, for Claude Code or for Codex, so a chat sitting in a background tab of a focused window counts as watched and stays quiet. A click brings the window forward and leaves it at that.

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 the event payload the agent hands the hook — the tool name, the question text, the working directory — and the permissions.allow rules of your settings files, to say which commands of a shell line are already allowed. Your session transcripts are not opened at all.

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. The bell in the status bar turns the alerts off altogether.

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