Clawdows

Approve, review and answer Claude Code — right from your Windows tray.

Clawdows is a tiny native companion for Claude Code on Windows. Clawd walks in your tray while Claude works — and when it needs a permission, a plan or an answer, a popup lets you respond without leaving your editor. One self-contained ~3.6 MB .exe.

Features

When Claude needs you, a small Claude-Code-style popup appears next to the tray — answer it in a click, or ignore it and the normal terminal prompt appears as always. Clawdows never blocks your flow.

• Permission approvals — Allow or Deny a tool call from the popup instead of switching windows to press y.
• Plan review — read Claude's plan rendered with headings, bullets and code, then Approve or Reject.
• Questions — answer an AskUserQuestion as buttons, single- or multi-select; your choice goes straight back to Claude.
• Clawd, the tray mascot — walks while Claude works, rests when it's idle.
• Multi-session dashboard — every active Claude Code session with its project, live state and timer.
• Terminal jump — click a session to raise its window, whatever it runs in (Windows Terminal, VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains…).
• Real states — Editing, Reading, Running, Searching, Browsing, Planning, Sub-agent… recovering cleanly on Esc.
• Usage on hover — context %, plus 5h / 7d plan usage (no dollar figures).
• Quiet by default — an optional gentle chime only when a long task finishes, plus an "are you there?" nudge if you step away.
• Native and tiny — one self-contained ~3.6 MB .exe: no runtime, no Node, no Electron. Installs its own hooks, comes and goes with your sessions, never launches at startup.
• Three languages — English, Español, 中文, auto-detected.

How can it approve permissions? Claude Code's PermissionRequest hook lets an external process decide a permission dialog. The popup writes the decision, the hook passes it back — no keystroke injection, no window tricks. If the tray isn't running (or you ignore the popup), the normal terminal prompt appears as always.

What it looks like

Everything happens in the corner — the popup by the tray, the panel from Clawd.

Permissions — Allow / Deny, right by the tray	Questions — answer as buttons, multi-select too
Dashboard — every session, state and timer	Plan review — rendered, with Approve / Reject

_{A subtle Windows toast when a long task finishes.}

🚀 Install

1. Download clawdows.exe from the latest release.

2. Put it somewhere permanent, open a terminal there and run:

   .\clawdows.exe install

3. Open a new Claude Code session. 🦀 Clawd appears and starts following along.

The installer wires Claude Code's hooks into settings.json (with a timestamped backup) and, if you have a custom status line, preserves it while adding usage data.

Multiple profiles (e.g. a claude2 alias with a different CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR)? Install into each:

.\clawdows.exe install --config-dir "C:\Users\you\.claude" --config-dir "C:\Users\you\.claude-acc2"

Uninstall: .\clawdows.exe uninstall — removes only its hooks and restores your status line. Upgrading from claude-status-bar? Just run .\clawdows.exe install — it migrates the old hooks automatically.

🧩 How it works

Claude Code fires hooks at each moment of its work. A tiny, instant invocation of the same .exe writes the current state to a small state.json; the tray reads it and draws Clawd. One binary, many hats:

Command	Role
clawdows	the tray icon (Clawd) + panel + approval popups
clawdows hook <event>	writes per-session state (called by the hooks)
clawdows hook permission	blocks on PermissionRequest until you click Allow/Deny (or falls through to the terminal)
clawdows statusline	feeds usage and passes through your status line
clawdows install · uninstall	wires / unwires everything

🛠️ Build from source

Needs the .NET 10 SDK + Visual C++ build tools (for the NativeAOT linker).

.\build.ps1   # -> .\dist\clawdows.exe

CI (GitHub Actions, windows-latest) builds and attaches the .exe to every tagged release.

🙏 Credits

🦀 Clawd is from the original macOS project m1ckc3s/claude-status-bar by Mick Cesanek (MIT) — go star it. Windows version & panel by @uxKero.

📄 License

MIT © uxKero · crab sprite © Mick Cesanek (MIT)

_{Not affiliated with Anthropic. "Claude" and its logo are trademarks of Anthropic.}