clawd-band

clawd-band puts a coral pixel cat in the band above the Claude Code prompt. It changes pose to match what Claude is doing. It only draws: no files, no network, nothing stored, zero tokens.

The author calls it an unofficial fan project. The coral colour and round body are inspired by the Claude mascot nicknamed Clawd, but every pixel is the author’s own and the project has no connection to Anthropic.

What it does

Seven states, each with a caption line such as clawd is thinking:

• Waiting: between turns. Ears up, a slow breath.
• Asleep: after about 27 seconds without a prompt. Ears folded, eyes shut, a z drifting up.
• Thinking: a turn starts, or Claude calls a tool the mod does not recognise.
• Editing: Edit, Write, MultiEdit or NotebookEdit. A pencil beside the right ear.
• Looking around: Read, Grep, Glob, WebFetch, WebSearch or Task. The head cranes left, then right.
• In the shell: Bash, BashOutput or KillShell. Ears back, sparks, open mouth.
• Ouch: a tool returns an error. Eyes crossed and a wobble for about a second and a half, then back to work.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later and an interactive terminal.

claude plugin marketplace add tomada1114/clawd-band
claude plugin install clawd-band@clawd-band

Start claude and the cat is there. If it is not and there is no error, run /plugin and check that clawd-band is named in the mods active line. claude plugin uninstall clawd-band removes it without a trace: it never writes to settings or the plugin store.

How it works

Four hooks drive a small state machine. session.start starts a frame clock at 180 ms, turn.start and turn.complete switch between thinking and waiting, and tool.call picks the pose. From each tool call the mod reads only the tool’s name and, once the call returns, whether the result was an error. It never sees the arguments: not the command a Bash call runs, not the file an Edit touches. Every call passes through unchanged.

The picture is a 26 by 9 cell Raster in the AbovePrompt band, repainted in place. A full redraw happens only when the state and its caption change. Nothing goes to the model.

The art is text in hooks/sprites.ts, thirteen characters by nine rows per frame, one character per pixel. Change the characters, restart Claude Code and the cat changes. To try edits, clone the repository and start claude --plugin-dir plugins/clawd-band.

Limitations

• Terminal only, as far as the author documents it: before mods launched in 2.1.287, the author wrote that it does not appear in the desktop app or in IDEs.
• It needs ten rows in the band, nine for the cat and one for the caption. With fewer it draws nothing. It also steps aside while a survey is showing.
• The README is in Japanese.
• Version 0.1.0, published on 16 September 2026.