spell-bar

spell-bar turns the session’s effort level into an animated bar above the Claude Code prompt. Clawd raises a wand and casts Avada Kedavra, with one rank of the curse for each effort level from low to ultracode, while Voldemort watches from the smoke behind him. It draws in the terminal and in the desktop app’s Code tab, and adds nothing to the conversation.

What it does

Each rank keeps everything the rank below it draws and adds a layer:

• I, low. A few sparks and a misfire. Of Voldemort, only the red eyes show.
• II, medium. A thin, jagged bolt that stops halfway.
• III, high. The bolt reaches the far side and lands with shockwave rings, green smoke and a flash that lights up Voldemort’s face.
• IV, xhigh. Arcs wrap the bolt, Clawd’s eyes go green and the bar shakes.
• V, max. The bolt thickens and pulses, and forked lightning strikes from the sky.
• VI, ultracode. The jet holds for most of the cast, the lightning strobes, the frame burns, and Clawd becomes the Dark Lord: pale green skin, black robe, bone-white wand.

Next to the animation sit the rank, a line with the effort and the model id (effort high · claude-opus-5-5) and six stars lit up to the current rank. In the terminal the scene is pixel art four rows tall, drawn in half blocks at 12 frames a second, with Clawd in the glyphs of his logo. In the desktop app it is an animated SVG banner sized to the band.

• /spell lists the ranks and shows what the bar is following.
• /spell 1 to /spell 6, a roman numeral (/spell IV) or an effort name (/spell max) pins a rank so you can look at it. /spell auto follows the effort again.
• /spell off hides the bar and /spell on brings it back.
• /spellbook opens a pane with all six ranks playing at once.

The author calls it an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with the Harry Potter rights holders or with Anthropic, and drew all the artwork from scratch.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later.

claude plugin marketplace add powerofjinbo/claude-code-spell-bar
claude plugin install spell-bar@claude-code-spell-bar

Start claude and the bar appears above the prompt. Until it has seen your effort level it shows rank I with the line effort not seen yet. claude plugin uninstall spell-bar removes it.

How it works

Plugins have no event for an effort change and no call that returns the current effort, so spell-bar reads it from two places:

• The flag settings, every 1.5 seconds. The desktop app’s effort picker writes its choice there, so a switch shows up without waiting for a message. low, medium, high and xhigh appear as themselves. The settings schema drops max, so a level that vanishes right after a pick is read as max. ultracode arrives as its own flag alongside xhigh.
• Each model request (turn.step). A request carries the effort it was sent with and the model, which covers max and the effort a session started with. Only the main conversation counts: subagent requests do not move the bar. The hook reads the request and passes it on unchanged.

A model that takes no effort setting shows rank I. A numeric thinking budget instead of a named level maps to ranks I to V by cut-offs the code itself calls rough.

spell-bar reads no prompts, tool calls or files and makes no network calls. It keeps three values in its plugin state: the last effort and model it saw, a pinned rank, and whether the bar is hidden. In the terminal a clock repaints the pixel strip 12 times a second; the desktop banner animates itself with CSS, so nothing redraws there. When Claude Code shows a survey above the prompt, the bar steps aside.

Limitations

• The author documents the update between messages for the desktop app’s effort picker. Otherwise the bar changes at the next model request.
• A new session gets its starting effort as a launch flag, which plugins cannot see. If the session’s flags already say ultracode is off and your first pick is max, nothing visible changes, and the bar catches up at the next message.
• Draws only in interactive sessions: nothing appears in claude -p or the VS Code extension’s chat panel.