clawd-actor

clawd-actor puts Clawd, Claude Code’s orange mascot, on a small stage above the prompt while Claude works, acting out the spinner’s -ing word. Sautéing has it stirring a pot, Moseying sends it strolling with two little Clawds in tow, Hatching cracks an egg. The show itself costs no tokens; only chatting with Clawd calls a model.

What it does

• 32 scenes, matched to the spinner word by stem, so Flambéing cooks and Dilly-dallying strolls. A word it does not know falls back to what the turn is doing: typing during tool use, talking while Claude responds, thinking otherwise.
• The running tool picks the opening scene instead of the word if one is already in flight when the turn’s first scene is chosen. Bash types, Read, Grep and Glob think, Edit and Write sketch, Agent herds sheep, web tools check the weather, TodoWrite and Skill juggle, MCP tools cast spells, and anything else gets hammered at an anvil.
• A new scene every 15 seconds on long turns, from an order shuffled once per session. It resumes where the last turn stopped and never shows the same scene twice in a row. From the second scene on, the show no longer follows the word or the tools.
• Little Clawds in blue, yellow, green and pink join some scenes: backup dancers, a hatchling, company by the campfire. In scenes without a pot, board or anvil, Clawd strolls left and right, blinking and glancing around. The stage follows the terminal width, up to 60 columns.
• /clawd works mid-turn without interrupting Claude. pet, feed, wave (or hi, hello), dance and shift play a few seconds of reaction for free. Anything else is a chat message, and Clawd answers in a speech bubble, in one or two sentences, in your language. /clawd on its own lists the options. Between turns Clawd steps out for the reaction and leaves again.

/clawd shift, or /clawd 閃身步, plays the flash step: Clawd calls out the move’s three characters one by one, then dashes across the stage leaving afterimages that fade.

If you would rather have a character that reacts to every tool call, with no network and no model calls, clawd-band does that. The clawd-actor sprite follows the Clawd on Claude Code’s welcome screen; the author describes the mod as fan-made and not affiliated with Anthropic.

From the author’s demo: the reply is a sample line. In a session, Haiku writes it.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later. The author documents Clawd in any terminal, including an editor’s terminal and the JetBrains plugin, and in the Code tab of the Desktop app.

claude plugin marketplace add BrianHuang813/clawd-actor
claude plugin install clawd-actor@clawd-actor

Run /reload-plugins in an open session, or start a new one, and send a prompt. Clawd walks on while Claude works and leaves when the turn ends.

How it works

• What it reads. A hook on the spinner only notes its word and mode and lets Claude Code draw it as usual. tool.call records the name of each tool in flight and forgets it when the call returns; it does not read the tool’s input or output. A timer advances a frame every 140 ms during a turn, and the band redraws from it. Between turns nothing is drawn.
• The model call. Only a /clawd chat message calls a model: one model.complete request to Haiku per message, on your usage. It sends up to 500 characters of what you typed, Clawd’s persona and one line on what Claude is doing (the spinner word, the running tool’s name and the current scene), and caps the answer at 150 tokens with a 15-second timeout. The answer appears only in the bubble. /clawd writes nothing to the transcript, so Claude’s conversation never sees either side. Each message stands alone, with no memory of earlier ones, and if the call fails Clawd answers with a fixed line. There is no setting to turn chat off; it simply never runs unless you type /clawd followed by something that is not an action word.
• The network. Two seconds after a session starts, it compares the version in its installed plugin.json with the one on the repository’s main branch, fetched from raw.githubusercontent.com, and shows a notice when main is newer. The first session after an update also asks the GitHub API for that release’s title and shows it with a link to the release notes. Offline, nothing shows. The only thing it stores is the last version it ran, in Claude Code’s plugin store.
• Updating. /clawd-actor:update is a skill: Claude runs the plugin manager’s update in your conversation and sums up what changed. By hand, claude plugin marketplace update clawd-actor and then claude plugin update clawd-actor@clawd-actor. This post describes version 0.6.2.
• Other band mods. The stage passes the band on and draws what the mods beneath it return under itself, giving them the rows it does not use. A band mod that answers without passing the band on hides everything beneath it; if Clawd never appears, the author suggests looking for one.

Limitations

• Draws nothing in the VS Code extension’s chat panel, claude -p or cloud sessions.
• The stage needs four free rows in the band; with fewer, Clawd stays out. A speech bubble needs at least three more, or Clawd’s reply is left out.
• The flash step needs a font that draws CJK characters two columns wide. A font that draws block characters wider than one cell may shift a frame.