clawd

clawd puts a tiny pixel Clawd, Claude’s orange mascot, beside Claude Code’s thinking line and has him act out what Claude is doing. He types while Claude edits a file, launches a rocket on git push and flips a table on the second error in a row: 79 acts, picked at random or by the tool and command Claude runs. He only draws, so he costs zero tokens.

The plugin installs as clawd. This page’s address carries the author’s name because Clawd turns up in other mods too, such as clawd-band and clawdhouse. The author calls it fan-made and not affiliated with Anthropic. The demo’s closing card counts 74 acts; version 0.3.0 has 79.

What it does

• While Claude thinks, one of 11 acts at random: a thought bubble, pacing, juggling, a lightbulb that flickers on, a rubber duck that quacks back, a sneeze.
• While a tool runs, an act for the tool: typing or a pencil for edits (on long edits a cat walks onto the keyboard), a book or a scanning glance for reads, a magnifying glass or a shovel for searches, a spinning globe for web searches and fetches, a clipboard for to-do lists and test runs, a mini Clawd running off on an errand for subagents. Anything else gets walking (mind the banana peel) or hammering. A shell command still going after 8 seconds sends him for popcorn.
• Command puns for 20 shell commands: a rocket for git push, an explosion for git push --force, sunglasses and a moustache for sudo, a tug of war for git pull, a whale for docker and kubectl, a trash can for rm, a cat for cat. Any other command, he just runs.
• When something fails, one of seven reactions, from a sweat drop to a faceplant. The second failure in a row always flips the table.
• When the turn ends, one of 13 cheers beside the line that says how long the turn took, from a bow to a moonwalk. Then he stands still there until your next message.
• With subagents still running after the turn ends, he plays with them: a mini Clawd in its own colour for each subagent, up to five, and a new game every 20 seconds (catch, a stadium wave, a conga line, high fives, a pyramid that never holds). Each buddy leaves when its subagent finishes.
• On long turns, from 30 seconds in he takes the odd break while thinking (coffee, a nap, watering a plant, fishing that sometimes lands a boot), and after a minute he puts headphones on.

Four settings live in /config under Clawd. Motion is normal, calm (slower), lively (faster) or still (one pose per act, no animation); he also holds still when Claude Code’s own Reduce motion setting is on. Command puns can be switched off so every command is a plain run. Breaks on long turns can be switched off. When Claude is done, stay keeps the cheer, the wait and the subagent games, and hide has him leave with the thinking line.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later and a terminal window about 66 columns wide or more.

claude plugin marketplace add raresmun/claude-mods
claude plugin install clawd@raresmun-mods

In a session that is already open, run /reload-plugins. Send a message and Clawd appears beside the thinking line. claude plugin uninstall clawd@raresmun-mods removes him.

How it works

The hooks module watches turn.start, tool.call and turn.complete, and uses ui.render to wrap two lines: the spinner’s thinking line and the line that closes a turn. Beside the current one it adds a stage up to 20 columns wide and two rows tall, drawn in quarter-block characters, so each cell holds 2 by 2 pixels. The line keeps 52 columns and Clawd needs at least 14, which is where the 66-column minimum comes from.

From each tool call in the main session it reads the tool’s name, whether the call failed or was denied and, for shell commands, the command text, which it matches on your machine against a short list of patterns to pick a pun. It ignores subagents’ tool calls and lets every call through unchanged. It also asks Claude Code which subagents are still running and whether Reduce motion is on.

It makes no network calls, writes no files and sends nothing to the model; the four settings are plugin options that Claude Code keeps in /config. The animation runs one frame every 100 ms (160 on calm, 70 on lively) while Claude works or waits on subagents, which the author puts at well under 1% of a CPU core, and runs no timer at all when idle.

Limitations

• Terminal only: the code draws on the terminal surface alone, so nothing appears in the Desktop app’s Code tab, the VS Code extension’s chat panel or claude -p.
• In a window narrower than about 66 columns he is not drawn.
• Mod events and methods can change between Claude Code versions. The author notes that if an update breaks Clawd, Claude Code skips the mod and carries on as normal.