dashline

A Claude Code status line in two halves: how full your context window is on the left, how much of your subscription you've spent on the right. It tells you to /compact before quality drops, and shows how much session and weekly budget you have left, without opening /usage.

Why

Two things go wrong in a long Claude Code session:

• The context window fills up. Past a point the model starts dropping detail, and you want to /compact, but by the time you notice you're already there.
• You run into a rate limit you didn't see coming, because the numbers live behind the /usage command instead of in front of you.

dashline puts both on screen at all times. The context bar turns yellow, then red with a → /compact prompt. The usage side counts down to your next session reset.

Install

A Claude Code plugin can't set the main status line on its own, so either way ends with settings.json pointing at the script. The plugin route runs that step for you.

As a plugin (recommended)

/plugin marketplace add ordinarynerds/dashline
/plugin install dashline@ordinarynerds
/dashline:install

/dashline:install backs up settings.json and points your status line at the installed script. Start a new session (or run /statusline) to see it.

Manual

Clone it and run the installer:

git clone https://github.com/ordinarynerds/dashline.git ~/.claude/dashline
~/.claude/dashline/scripts/install.sh

Or set it by hand in ~/.claude/settings.json, using the absolute path to the script:

{
  "statusLine": {
    "type": "command",
    "command": "/Users/you/.claude/dashline/statusline/dashline.sh",
    "refreshInterval": 1
  }
}

To remove it, run scripts/install.sh --uninstall, or restore the settings.json.bak-dashline-* backup the installer leaves behind.

Requirements: bash, jq, and awk (present on macOS and most Linux). perl is used for right-justifying the usage half; without it the two halves fall back to a fixed gap.

Reading it

⎇ main · Opus 4.8 44% ████░░░░░░ (440k/1.0M) · high     session 61% (↻2h11m) · All 74%

Left: context window

• ⎇ main: the current git branch. In a linked git worktree it also shows the worktree folder, e.g. ⎇ fix (hotfix-wt). Hidden outside a repo.
• Opus 4.8: the current model.
• 44% ████░░░░░░: how full the window is. Green under 40%, yellow ("high") from 40%, red with → /compact [next goal/task] from 50%. [next goal/task] is a reminder that /compact takes an instruction: tell it what you're about to do next.
• (440k/1.0M): tokens in context over the window size.

Right: subscription usage (Pro/Max only)

• session 61%: the rolling 5-hour window, the same "current session" /usage shows.
• (↻2h11m): time until that session resets, counting down live.
• All 74%: the 7-day weekly limit across all models.

Usage numbers go yellow at 70% and red at 90%.

Configuration

Every knob is an environment variable, read at each refresh. Set them where Claude Code picks up your environment, or edit the defaults at the top of dashline.sh.

Variable	Default	Effect
DASHLINE_WARN	40	context turns yellow ("high") at/above this %
DASHLINE_COMPACT	50	context turns red with → /compact here
DASHLINE_WIDTH	10	context bar width, in characters
DASHLINE_USAGE	1	set to 0 to hide the usage half
DASHLINE_USAGE_WARN	70	usage % turns yellow at/above this
DASHLINE_USAGE_CRIT	90	usage % turns red at/above this
DASHLINE_GIT	1	set to 0 to hide the git branch/worktree
DASHLINE_MARGIN	5	columns left free at the right edge
DASHLINE_COLS	auto	override terminal width for justification

If the right half ever gets cut off with a …, raise DASHLINE_MARGIN.

How it works

Claude Code hands the status-line command a JSON payload on stdin. dashline reads it and prints one line: no network calls, no transcript parsing, nothing that drifts out of sync between releases.

• Context comes from context_window (used_percentage, total_input_tokens, context_window_size) and model.display_name. When it's null (right after a /compact, or before the first response), the left side shows --.
• Usage comes from rate_limits.five_hour and rate_limits.seven_day, each with a used_percentage and a resets_at epoch. These appear for Pro/Max accounts after the first response of a session.
• The git branch isn't in the payload, so dashline reads it from git in workspace.current_dir (one rev-parse), and shows the worktree name when that dir is a linked worktree.

The payload carries only those two windows, so there's no per-model weekly breakdown to show. Every field is optional; a missing one just drops its part of the line.

License

MIT © Ordinary Nerds. See LICENSE.