You already run /usage and /context all day. This bash statusline puts both, plus your 5h reset time and working directory, at the bottom of every Claude Code prompt as colored progress bars. Exact script inside.
I'm on Claude Code Max 5x. It's a generous plan. It is also not infinite.
Three things kept catching me off guard. The 5-hour session window would fill up in the middle of a long chain of edits and suddenly I was on a cooldown I hadn't seen coming. The 7-day rolling limit was a slower version of the same problem. And the context window would creep toward full during a deep session and I'd only notice when the responses got weirdly slow.
I knew all three numbers existed somewhere. You can already get the rate limits by running /usage in Claude Code, and the context window by running /context. I was running both commands several times an hour, which is exactly the friction I was trying to avoid in the first place.
It turns out Claude Code has a statusline feature that very few people seem to know about. It runs a shell command before every prompt and prints whatever that command returns at the bottom of your terminal. That's the whole primitive. You get to decide what goes in it. So instead of typing /usage and /context on demand, I put both of them plus my working directory and my 5h reset time in the statusline and never have to ask again.
I asked Claude to build mine. It took four rounds of back-and-forth to land it where I wanted. Here's what I ended up with and why.
What the statusline actually is
A statusLine entry in your ~/.claude/settings.json that points at a script. Every time you hit enter on a Claude Code prompt, the harness pipes a JSON blob to that script over stdin and prints whatever your script writes to stdout.
The JSON blob contains useful fields. For my purposes:
-
cwd, the current working directory -
rate_limits.five_hour.used_percentageandresets_at rate_limits.seven_day.used_percentagecontext_window.used_percentage
That is all I needed.
How I worked with Claude on this one
This was the statusline-setup agent end to end. I'd tell the agent what I wanted, it would write the script, I'd look at the output in my terminal, then come back and say "now change this." Four rounds total:
- First pass: show 5h, 7d, context, cwd as percentages.
- "Shorter. Show just the folder, not the full path. Can we use bars instead of percentages?"
- "Move the folder to the front. Color the bars by severity."
- "Add the reset time for the 5-hour bar."
I didn't hand-edit the script at any point. Every change went through the agent. Not because I was trying to be pure about it, just because the iterations were fast enough that writing prose was quicker than diffing bash.
The stack
bash + jq + ANSI escape codes. That's it.
The script lives at ~/.claude/statusline-command.sh. The settings.json entry points at it:
"statusLine": {
"type": "command",
"command": "bash /Users/YOURNAME/.claude/statusline-command.sh"
}
No install step, no build, no dependencies beyond jq (which most dev machines already have).
The bars
I wanted the progress bars to be visually distinct from each other so I could spot trouble at a glance. Claude's first pass had them all in the same dim color, which was technically working but useless for scanning. That was round three of corrections.
The fix was severity coloring. The filled portion of each bar gets green, yellow, or red depending on how full it is. The empty portion stays dim gray.
bar_color() {
pct="$1"
int_pct=$(printf '%.0f' "$pct" 2>/dev/null || echo 0)
if [ "$int_pct" -ge 81 ] 2>/dev/null; then
printf '\033[0;31m' # red
elif [ "$int_pct" -ge 50 ] 2>/dev/null; then
printf '\033[0;33m' # yellow
else
printf '\033[0;32m' # green
fi
}
Green below 50, yellow 50 to 80, red above 80. So when I glance down and see two greens and a yellow, I'm fine. Two yellows and a red, I wrap up the current task before I lose the session.
Drawing a 10-slot bar in pure shell
The bar itself is 10 Unicode blocks, some filled, some empty. This function computes how many slots to fill, then paints them with ANSI colors:
make_bar() {
pct="$1"
filled=$(printf '%.0f' "$(echo "$pct * 10 / 100" | bc -l 2>/dev/null || echo 0)")
[ "$filled" -gt 10 ] 2>/dev/null && filled=10
[ "$filled" -lt 0 ] 2>/dev/null && filled=0
color=$(bar_color "$pct")
reset='\033[0m'
dim='\033[2;37m'
bar=""
i=0
while [ "$i" -lt "$filled" ]; do
bar="${bar}${color}\xe2\x96\x88${reset}"
i=$((i + 1))
done
while [ "$i" -lt 10 ]; do
bar="${bar}${dim}\xe2\x96\x91${reset}"
i=$((i + 1))
done
printf '['; printf "$bar"; printf ']'
}
\xe2\x96\x88 is the full block character, \xe2\x96\x91 is the light shade. Escape color, character, reset, repeat. The trailing reset on every character matters. If you skip them, a tmux resize or scrollback can bleed color into adjacent text.
The reset timestamp
The nice detail I didn't realize I wanted until I saw the finished version: the 5-hour bar shows when it resets, not just how full it is.
The JSON gives you resets_at as a Unix timestamp. On macOS, date -r takes a timestamp directly:
five_reset_str=$(date -r "$five_resets" "+%-I:%M%p" 2>/dev/null \
| tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
[ -n "$five_reset_str" ] && five_reset_str=" rst:${five_reset_str}"
%-I strips the leading zero so 03:45pm renders as 3:45pm. tr lowercases it so it reads closer to how I'd write the time in a note: 3:45pm rather than 3:45PM.
Now the 5h segment looks like 5h:[████████░░]82% rst:3:45pm. I can see both the cost and the clock.
Where Claude surprised me
The severity coloring was me saying "make the bars not all gray, use any colors that make sense" and the agent came back with the green/yellow/red thresholds on its own. I was expecting I'd have to define the ranges. Not complicated logic, but it picked reasonable cutoffs without me specifying them and I didn't need to adjust after.
Where Claude fell short
The first version wrote out full paths for the working directory. I told it I wanted just the folder name. That was a one-line basename fix. Easy, but it's the kind of thing "good default" might have caught without me asking.
The first version also had ASCII bars all in the same dim gray. Functional but not useful. I had to explicitly ask for color differentiation. On re-read, my original prompt did ask for visual bars but didn't say anything about severity, so that's fair. Still, "make the bars informative" would have been my one-shot prompt if I were writing it now.
It also wrote the code to extract rate_limits.five_hour.resets_at before confirming the field actually existed in the JSON payload. It was a plausible path, and it happened to be correct, but it was a guess. For a less obvious field I'd have wasted a round on a hallucinated schema.
The fastest way to get this setup
If you want the exact statusline I have without hand-editing bash, paste this into any Claude Code session and let it do the work:
Set up my Claude Code statusline to show my working directory folder name, my 5-hour usage as a severity-colored progress bar with the reset time next to it, my 7-day usage as a severity-colored progress bar, and my context window as a severity-colored progress bar. Green under 50%, yellow 50 to 80%, red above 80%. Write a bash script at
~/.claude/statusline-command.shand register it in~/.claude/settings.json.
Claude Code ships with a statusline-setup agent that's purpose-built for this. That prompt will trigger it and you'll have the same setup in a minute or two. If it picks defaults you don't like, say "now change this" and iterate.
The whole script, if you want mine
If you'd rather read the bash yourself, save this as ~/.claude/statusline-command.sh:
#!/bin/sh
input=$(cat)
cwd=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.cwd // .workspace.current_dir // empty')
ctx_used=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.context_window.used_percentage // empty')
five_pct=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.rate_limits.five_hour.used_percentage // empty')
five_resets=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.rate_limits.five_hour.resets_at // empty')
week_pct=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.rate_limits.seven_day.used_percentage // empty')
bar_color() {
pct="$1"
int_pct=$(printf '%.0f' "$pct" 2>/dev/null || echo 0)
if [ "$int_pct" -ge 81 ] 2>/dev/null; then
printf '\033[0;31m'
elif [ "$int_pct" -ge 50 ] 2>/dev/null; then
printf '\033[0;33m'
else
printf '\033[0;32m'
fi
}
make_bar() {
pct="$1"
filled=$(printf '%.0f' "$(echo "$pct * 10 / 100" | bc -l 2>/dev/null || echo 0)")
[ "$filled" -gt 10 ] 2>/dev/null && filled=10
[ "$filled" -lt 0 ] 2>/dev/null && filled=0
color=$(bar_color "$pct")
reset='\033[0m'
dim='\033[2;37m'
bar=""
i=0
while [ "$i" -lt "$filled" ]; do
bar="${bar}${color}\xe2\x96\x88${reset}"
i=$((i + 1))
done
while [ "$i" -lt 10 ]; do
bar="${bar}${dim}\xe2\x96\x91${reset}"
i=$((i + 1))
done
printf '['; printf "$bar"; printf ']'
}
parts=""
if [ -n "$cwd" ]; then
folder=$(basename "$cwd")
parts="${parts}$(printf '\033[0;36m%s\033[0m ' "$folder")"
fi
if [ -n "$five_pct" ]; then
bar=$(make_bar "$five_pct")
five_reset_str=""
if [ -n "$five_resets" ]; then
five_reset_str=$(date -r "$five_resets" "+%-I:%M%p" 2>/dev/null \
| tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
[ -n "$five_reset_str" ] && five_reset_str=" rst:${five_reset_str}"
fi
parts="${parts}$(printf '\033[0;33m5h:\033[0m%s%.0f%%%s ' "$bar" "$five_pct" "$five_reset_str")"
fi
if [ -n "$week_pct" ]; then
bar=$(make_bar "$week_pct")
parts="${parts}$(printf '\033[0;33m7d:\033[0m%s%.0f%% ' "$bar" "$week_pct")"
fi
if [ -n "$ctx_used" ]; then
bar=$(make_bar "$ctx_used")
parts="${parts}$(printf '\033[0;35mctx:\033[0m%s%.0f%%' "$bar" "$ctx_used")"
fi
printf '%s' "$parts"
Make it executable (chmod +x ~/.claude/statusline-command.sh), then add this to ~/.claude/settings.json:
"statusLine": {
"type": "command",
"command": "bash /Users/YOURNAME/.claude/statusline-command.sh"
}
Replace YOURNAME with your actual home directory. Restart Claude Code. Run a prompt. The statusline shows up after the first response, which is when the JSON starts carrying real usage numbers.
The output looks like this on my machine:
Folder first, then 5h with its reset time, then 7d, then context. The bars shift from green to yellow to red as the meters fill up, so I can scan the line without reading numbers.
Styling tips
A few things I learned by iterating on this:
Label colors matter more than bar colors. I used cyan for the cwd, yellow for 5h and 7d labels, purple for ctx. When I glance down, the label colors are what tell me which segment I'm looking at. The bar colors just tell me severity.
Keep segments narrow. Ten-slot bars are small enough to fit four segments on one line in a typical terminal. I tried 20-slot bars at one point and they wrapped on my laptop screen.
Always reset after every ANSI escape. I've been burned by color bleeding into the rest of the terminal after a process crashes mid-write. The ${reset} after every character is paranoid but cheap.
Hide segments when the data isn't there yet. The rate-limit numbers aren't populated until Claude Code has made at least one API call in the session. If you print them unconditionally you get an ugly 5h:[░░░░░░░░░░] on a fresh start. The if [ -n ... ] guards handle that.
Where it is now
Running on my machine. I see it every prompt. It has already saved me from one 5h wall I didn't notice coming. Low stakes, nice feature, took about an hour of back-and-forth to land.
What I'd do differently
Tell Claude the severity thresholds up front. I let the agent pick them and it happened to get it right, but on a different day I might have wanted different cutoffs and wasted a round correcting. Specifying "green under 50, yellow 50-80, red over 80" in the first prompt costs nothing.
Ask the agent to verify fields in the JSON before writing code. The resets_at field happened to exist. For a feature you're actually shipping, the "does this field exist" check should happen before the "format it as a time" code. A one-line jq against a sample payload would have caught it.
Don't wait to try it. I almost didn't build this because it felt like yak-shaving. It took under an hour and changed how I pace work inside Claude Code. If you've never opened the statusLine key in your settings.json, that's where to start.
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