easyHeadroom

Stop hand-rolling your rtk init, Headroom proxy, and tokensave init setup. easyHeadroom is a VS Code extension that installs and configures RTK, Headroom, and TokenSave for you, so your CLI coding agent burns far fewer tokens on every shell command, API call, and codebase-exploration query.

What it does

• Installs RTK, Headroom, and/or TokenSave automatically — no manual binary download, no PATH wrangling.
• RTK works across agents — Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI, pick which ones via easy-headroom.rtk.agents. Headroom (the API proxy) is Claude-Code-only, since it works by pointing ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL at itself. TokenSave registers itself as an MCP server and indexes every open workspace folder, so code-graph lookups replace token-hungry grep/Explore-agent searches.
• Wires up the hooks (rtk init --global --auto-patch) safely — won't re-patch your config on every restart — and points Claude Code at the Headroom proxy per project, whether you use the Claude Code VS Code extension or the standalone claude CLI.
• Works on one host or several. Use it standalone on your laptop, or point it at a centralized Headroom instance to aggregate RTK savings across every host — see easy-headroom-docker below for a ready-made way to deploy that instance.
• One click to your dashboard, right from the status bar — including a CO₂ tab estimating the carbon footprint avoided by your savings.
• Stays out of your way. Don't want Headroom? Enable RTK only — zero network config touched.

The status bar shield — click it 👉 🛡️

Everything this extension shows you lives behind one button: the 🛡️ shield in the status bar, bottom right of the window.

• When VS Code starts, it briefly announces itself as an animated easy-headroom label on an orange background, then settles down to the shield alone.
• Click it to open your dashboard: Headroom, RTK, TokenSave and CO₂ tabs, plus a Settings tab where every option below can be changed without leaving the panel.
• Hover it for a summary: which of the three layers are enabled, the version of each, and the total tokens saved.
• Green shield = everything is running. Red shield = something needs you (a failed setup step, an unreachable proxy, a missing remoteUrl) — the tooltip says which layer, and a misconfigured Headroom opens straight onto the Settings tab so you can fix it there.

Install

Or search for easy-headroom in the VS Code Extensions view, or:

code --install-extension Vitalyn.easy-headroom

Quick start

1. Install the extension.
2. Open the settings and pick what you want:
   • easy-headroom.rtk.enabled — shell output compression (on by default).
   • easy-headroom.rtk.agents — which agents RTK sets up (claude by default; add gemini/codex as needed).
   • easy-headroom.headroom.enabled — API compression, caching, and output shaping (Claude Code only).
   • easy-headroom.tokensave.enabled — code-graph MCP server for token-efficient code research (on by default).
3. If you enable Headroom, choose a mode:
   • local — the extension runs the proxy for you, right on your machine. Nothing else to set up.
   • remote — already have a centralized Headroom instance running? Just point remoteUrl at it.
4. Click the 🛡️ shield in the status bar any time to jump to your savings dashboard — see above.

Running Headroom on multiple hosts?

See easy-headroom-docker — a logically separate project that self-hosts Headroom plus a small aggregation service, so RTK savings from every host roll up into one shared dashboard.

Why this exists

I was tired of installing and wiring up RTK, Headroom, and TokenSave by hand on every project, and on every container/host I worked on — rtk init --global, Headroom proxy and env vars, tokensave init, PATH management, repeated every single time. All three are excellent, independent tools, but none ships a one-click setup, and none is designed for a Headroom instance shared across multiple machines. This extension automates the former and enables the latter, so I stop doing this by hand.

Sponsor

If this project is useful to you, consider sponsoring on GitHub.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE.