Show & tell: Claude Code status-line indicator for headroom (live token-savings badge)

[Ship-Wright]

Hi headroom team & community! 👋

I built a small Claude Code plugin that surfaces headroom right in the editor's status line, so you can see it working instead of wondering whether you remembered to compress that huge file.

What it shows (bottom status bar, updates ~1s):

• 🔴 ○ headroom idle (not compressing yet) — before the first headroom_compress
• 🟢 ● headroom · ~1490 tok saved · 5× — after: the running session total of tokens saved + how many times it fired
• ⚪ dims back to idle after 60s of quiet (keeps the total)

How it works: it reads the real Claude Code session transcript and counts tool_use calls to mcp__headroom__headroom_compress, summing the tokens_saved each call reports (linked by tool_use_id). So merely calling stats/retrieve does not false-trigger it — only real compression flips it green. Cross-platform, pure jq + shell.

Install (two lines in Claude Code):

/plugin marketplace add Ship-Wright/headroom-plugin
/plugin install headroom-usage-indicator@headroom-tools

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/Ship-Wright/headroom-plugin

It's been a genuinely nice nudge to actually use compression on big JSON/logs. Huge thanks for headroom — feedback and PRs very welcome, and happy to adjust anything if you'd like to reference it. 🙏