claude-rocketline

A compact, themeable Claude Code status line, styled like a Powerlevel10k prompt — angled powerline segments, a context-window meter, git info, and a clock. Built by a designer who cared too much about a single line in a terminal. 🏎️🔥

About

I've been a designer for 30 years and a developer for most of them — terminal-first for 25 of those, Powerlevel10k user for the last five. When Claude Code landed I already had strong opinions about what a status line should do. The default felt like a missed opportunity.

So I built one. Named themes, a responsive shed order, a context meter that shifts from green to red as the window fills, and end caps styled like a rocket on a rail. The danny and dark-dan themes are mine (dial them in with environment variables or swap in your own colors).

This is a designer's take on a developer tool. Opinionated, themeable, and built to stay on one line no matter what.

_{(plain-text fallback if the image hasn't loaded:)}

🔥 🤖  Opus 4.8 (1M ctx)[high]  🧠 70%|3h30m  /        / my-app  main  09:00:19  /

• Apple + 🤖 badge — OS icon (auto: macOS/Linux/Windows) paired with the AI
• Model — name + reasoning effort, e.g. Opus 4.8 (1M ctx)[high]
• 🧠 Context meter — % of context window remaining, green→yellow→red, with a recessed | 3h30m 5-hour-limit reset countdown
• Repo · branch · clock — right-aligned; repo shows the folder name (no long root path), branch is color-coded clean/dirty
• Signature rocket ends — a flame trailing the left, a slant / nosing the right, so the line reads like it's moving left→right 🚀

Responsive layout

The bar is width-aware: as the terminal narrows it sheds the least-important segments instead of clipping, then trims the model label — so it always stays on one line. Peel order:

clock → branch → repo → reset countdown → [effort] → (model qualifier) → context chip

Reproduce it yourself: bash demos/responsive.sh (widen to ~115 cols, then screenshot).

Requirements

• A Nerd Font (e.g. MesloLGS NF, the Powerlevel10k default). Without one, the powerline separators, flame, apple, branch, and brain glyphs render as tofu (□).
  • You don't have to make a Nerd Font your primary terminal font. Any terminal with a font-fallback chain (Ghostty, kitty, WezTerm) lets you keep a ligature-rich coding font as primary and add a Nerd Font as a fallback — the icon codepoints resolve from the fallback while your code keeps its ligatures. In Ghostty, just repeat font-family:

    font-family = Your-Coding-Font
    font-family = Symbols Nerd Font Mono
    

    Berkeley Mono pairs especially well in this role — it ships specialized coding ligatures (===, ++, !=, ->, =>, etc.) that carry through unaffected while the Nerd Font fallback supplies the icon codepoints. Prefer the symbols-only build (brew install --cask font-symbols-only-nerd-font) so the fallback only supplies icons and never lends a stray Latin glyph. No p10k/statusline changes are needed — they just emit the codepoints; the terminal renders them.
• bash, jq, and git on PATH.
• Claude Code (the status line reads its JSON from stdin).

Install

git clone https://github.com/dgaidula/claude-rocketline.git
cd claude-rocketline
./install.sh        # copies statusline.sh to ~/.claude/ and prints the settings snippet

Or manually: copy statusline.sh to ~/.claude/statusline.sh, chmod +x it, and add this to ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "statusLine": {
    "type": "command",
    "command": "~/.claude/statusline.sh"
  }
}

Themes & options

Set via environment variables in the command (they compose):

"command": "STATUSLINE_THEME=dark-dan STATUSLINE_CAPS=rounded ~/.claude/statusline.sh"

Variable	Values	Default	What it does
STATUSLINE_THEME	danny · dark-dan	danny	Light signature theme vs. true-dark variant
STATUSLINE_CAPS	flame · slant · rounded · pointed	flame	End-cap style
STATUSLINE_OS_ICON	any glyph	auto	Override the OS badge icon
STATUSLINE_CTX_ICON	any glyph/emoji	🧠	Context-meter icon
STATUSLINE_PIPE	256-color code	250/240	The `
STATUSLINE_FLAME	hex F2920D / 256-num	auto	Flame accent — auto true-color on truecolor terminals (COLORTERM), else 256-color 208
STATUSLINE_BLUE	256-color code	theme	Model + repo segment color
STATUSLINE_NEUTRAL / _FG	256-color code	theme	Grey badge/clock bg / text
STATUSLINE_BADGE_BG/_FG, STATUSLINE_TIME_BG/_FG	256-color	theme	Per-segment fine control
STATUSLINE_LCAP / _RCAP	glyph(+ANSI)	theme	Raw end-cap override

Themes

• danny — light badge leading, a 238-grey clock anchoring the right, teal-blue model/repo, orange-flame accent.
• dark-dan — true dark: dim grey neutrals, teal-blue model/repo, muted context colors, with the flame as the one bright accent.

_{(plain-text fallback — run bash demos/showcase.sh to see it live)}

Demos

bash demos/preview.sh     # the line across several scenarios
bash demos/showcase.sh    # every theme × cap style

Notes / caveats

• Right-alignment needs a terminal width. The script tries Claude Code's terminal.width/cols, then $COLUMNS, then tput cols, then falls back to 100.
• The reset countdown only appears when Claude Code provides rate_limits.five_hour.resets_at; it degrades gracefully when absent.
• The script defensively unsets GIT_DIR/GIT_WORK_TREE (some shells export GIT_DIR=./.git, which breaks git -C in subdirectories).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.