Claude Status in My Menu Bar

Got sick of checking status.claude.com every time Claude felt slow. Wondered if there was an outage or if I was just being impatient.

So Claude code built a menu bar thing. Took about 5 minutes.

What It Does

Little icon in the menu bar:

• 🟢/🟡/🟠/🔴 based on Claude's current status
• Shows today's message count from Claude Code
• Click it for usage stats and recent incidents

Setup

Install SwiftBar - it turns shell scripts into menu bar apps:

brew install --cask swiftbar

Create a plugins folder:

mkdir -p ~/SwiftBarPlugins

Create the script at ~/SwiftBarPlugins/claude-status.5m.sh (the 5m means refresh every 5 minutes). Full script is in the gist below - it's about 80 lines of bash that fetches the RSS feed and reads Claude Code's stats file.

Make it executable:

chmod +x ~/SwiftBarPlugins/claude-status.5m.sh

Open SwiftBar, point it at ~/SwiftBarPlugins, done.

How It Works

Fetches the RSS feed from status.claude.com/history.rss and checks the latest incident. "Resolved" = green. "Monitoring" = yellow. "Identified" = orange. Anything else = red.

For usage stats, Claude Code dumps everything into ~/.claude/stats-cache.json. Messages, tool calls, sessions, tokens by model. The script reads that and shows today's numbers.

SwiftBar's format is dead simple - everything after echo "---" becomes a dropdown item. Add | href=URL for links, | color=red for colours.

Result

Tiny indicator in my menu bar. Glance at it, know if Claude's fucked or if I'm just being paranoid. See how much I've used it today without opening anything.

Built this while procrastinating. Sometimes the best tools are the ones you throw together in 10 minutes.