BetterClaude

BetterClaude, an Electron desktop app that wraps the real claude.ai with themes, plugins, and productivity tools, has been released as an open-source project. The app injects a UI layer without modifying Anthropic's code or login, and all features are off by default, with no telemetry or account requirements beyond the existing claude.ai login. It includes nine productivity modules, such as a Skill Marketplace, Prompt Library, and Usage Analytics Dashboard, all toggleable in Settings.

A BetterDiscord-style enhancement suite for Claude. Themes, plugins, and a pile of productivity tools layered on top of the Claude app you already use, without touching Anthropic's code or your login. An Electron desktop app that loads the real claude.ai and injects a layer of UI and settings on top of it — not a fork, not a proxy, not a modified client. It's a window wrapped around the genuine site with an extra layer of chrome bolted on. Turn everything off in Settings and you're back to stock claude.ai instantly; no uninstall, no reset, no leftover state in your account. Nothing here ever touches your login, reads your conversations to phone them home, or ships a modified copy of Anthropic's code — every feature is either a local UI layer on top of the page or a genuinely local tool an analytics database, a settings file, a spawned terminal that never leaves your machine unless you explicitly point it at a relay or repo you control. How it actually works how-it-actually-works Productivity modules productivity-modules Themes & the Appearance Editor themes--the-appearance-editor Plugins plugins Buddies buddies The little stuff the-little-stuff Settings, storage & privacy settings-storage--privacy Building it yourself building-it-yourself Releasing & auto-update releasing--auto-update Contributing contributing BetterClaude is an Electron BrowserWindow pointed at the real claude.ai , with a core/ bundle injected into the page as a preload/content layer — the same general shape as a browser extension, just packaged as a standalone desktop app instead of living inside Chrome. Concretely: core/claude-dom.js reads and reacts to claude.ai's actual DOM message list, composer, sidebar rather than replacing it, so the real site keeps rendering your real conversations. core/theme-engine.js and core/tokens.js apply theming through CSS custom properties --bc- variables laid on top of claude.ai's own styles, not a hard fork of its stylesheet — which is also why themes restyle everything injected including the embedded Claude Code terminal live, with no reload. core/plugin-loader.js loads .claudeplugin.js files built-in and yours into that same page context, sandboxed enough that a broken plugin doesn't take the whole app down. electron/main.js is the only process with real OS access — spawning the Claude Code CLI, watching files, talking to SQLite, hitting the GitHub API. The renderer talks to it exclusively through a contextBridge electron/preload.js / electron/code-preload.js , with nodeIntegration off, so page content never gets a raw path to Node or the filesystem.- Every one of the modules below is off unless you turn it on . The app's baseline state, before you touch a single toggle, is "claude.ai with better themes." Nothing phones home, collects telemetry, or requires an account beyond the claude.ai login you already have. Nine productivity modules, each independently toggleable from its own section in Settings and persisted through the same electron-store -backed settings file as everything else. Short version first, then what's actually happening under the hood for each. | Module | Off by default? | |---|---| | Skill Marketplace | Yes | | Prompt Library | No | | Native File Watcher Sync | No | | Team/Shared Plugin Sync | Yes | | Usage Analytics Dashboard | Yes | | Cross-Device Clipboard Bridge | Yes | | Smart Notification Digest | Yes | | Command Palette Cmd/Ctrl+K | No | | Embedded Claude Code window | No | Skill Marketplace Settings → Skill Marketplace — browses public GitHub repos tagged claude-skill through the GitHub Search API; add your own personal access token in Settings if you want a higher rate limit than the anonymous API gives you. "Install" on a result downloads its SKILL.md plus any bundled assets straight into userData/skills/<id / on disk. It stops there on purpose: claude.ai has no public API for registering a Skill programmatically, so BetterClaude can't and doesn't try to upload it for you — you still take the last step yourself via claude.ai → Settings → Capabilities. What it actually buys you is not hand-cloning repos and hunting for the right file; updating an installed skill works the same way, re-running "Install" over an existing id re-downloads and overwrites that folder's contents from the repo's current main , so refreshing a skill you already have is the same one click as installing it fresh. The catalog UI lives in core/skill-marketplace.js and opens from Cmd/Ctrl+K → "Open Skill Marketplace"; the download/search logic is a set of skills: IPC handlers in electron/main.js . Prompt Library Settings → Prompt Library — a saved-prompt manager with {{variable}} placeholders, including two that auto-fill: {{clipboard}} and {{selection}} . Open the picker overlay core/prompt-picker.js with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P, from the Command Palette, or bind any individual prompt to its own OS-wide global shortcut — that registration goes through Electron's globalShortcut API via registerPromptShortcuts in electron/main.js , so it fires even when BetterClaude isn't the focused window. Prompts import/export as JSON and merge by id on import, so pulling in someone else's shared library never silently wipes your own. Native File Watcher Sync Settings → File Watcher — points at a local file, watches it with chokidar in the main process, and keeps a labeled fenced-code-block copy of its contents synced into the composer core/file-sync-indicator.js . This deliberately does not fake claude.ai's real file-upload button — the synced content is genuine inserted text, not a spoofed attachment, so what Claude sees is exactly what's in your composer box. "Auto-reattach" only ever finds and replaces that same block inside a message you haven't sent yet; once a message is sent, a file that changes afterward is just flagged stale with a one-click re-insert rather than silently rewriting something already delivered. Team/Shared Plugin Sync Settings → Team Sync — points at a git repo containing shared .claudeplugin.js and/or theme .css files. electron/team-sync.js shells out to your system's git binary clone once, then fetch + hard-reset on every later sync — no bundled JS git library into userData/team-sync/<repo-slug / , then copies the matched files into the exact same userData/plugins / userData/themes folders a manually-added plugin or theme already lives in, so nothing about how they load is special-cased. You can pull manually with "Sync now" or set an interval. Conflict handling is hash-based: a per-file manifest remembers what was last applied, so a sync can distinguish "the repo changed" from "you edited your local copy." A file where both changed since the last sync surfaces as a conflict with an inline diff and a Keep mine / Take theirs choice; anything non-conflicting applies automatically when "Auto-apply" is on. Usage Analytics Dashboard Settings → Usage Analytics — a most-used-plugins chart with a date-range picker presets plus a custom range and CSV/PNG export, built entirely from plugin-activity events logged locally once you turn it on. electron/analytics-db.js stores those events in a genuine SQLite database via sql.js , SQLite compiled to WebAssembly at userData/analytics.sqlite — WASM instead of a native addon like better-sqlite3 specifically so there's no per-platform native rebuild step, and so the same engine could run inside a browser extension down the line. The charts themselves are hand-rolled Canvas 2D core/analytics-charts.js , no charting library dependency at all. No conversation content is ever read or recorded here, and nothing is ever transmitted anywhere; "Clear all data" deletes the local database file outright. Open the dashboard from Cmd/Ctrl+K → "Open Usage Analytics" or Settings → Usage Analytics → "Open Dashboard." Cross-Device Clipboard Bridge Settings → Clipboard Bridge — copy something on one device and it's paste-ready on another within a short TTL. It syncs through a relay you point it at: scripts/clipboard-relay-server.js is a minimal, self-hostable reference implementation npm run clipboard-relay , or node scripts/clipboard-relay-server.js --port 8787 , and any HTTP endpoint implementing the same tiny POST /put / GET /pull / GET /health protocol works as a drop-in replacement. Everything is end-to-end encrypted client-side before it ever leaves your machine — core/clipboard-bridge.js derives an AES-GCM key from a shared passphrase you set via PBKDF2, so the relay only ever sees ciphertext plus a one-way channel id, never plaintext and never the passphrase itself. Nothing syncs until both a relay URL and a passphrase are configured and the toggle is on; Settings → Clipboard Bridge always shows a live connection state Disconnected / Connecting / Connected / Error , and every item that syncs fires a notification, so it's never silently reading or writing your clipboard in the background. Polling, encryption, and OS clipboard read/write all happen in electron/main.js , mirroring the same main-process-only pattern as File Watcher Sync. Smart Notification Digest Settings → Notifications → Smart Notification Digest — batches routine background-completion notifications a Team Sync file applied, a clipboard item synced, a skill finished installing, … into one periodic native OS notification instead of firing a toast per event. Failures are deliberately exempt from batching: electron/preload.js 's notify has an urgent flag that shows immediately as both an in-page toast and a native notification regardless of digest state — used, for example, when a background Team Sync auto-sync fails. The digest only ever delays "it worked" noise; it never delays or hides an error. Native delivery itself is a small Notification.isSupported -guarded notifications:show-native IPC handler in electron/main.js . Command Palette Cmd/Ctrl+K, Settings → Command Palette — the connective tissue across everything above, built last on purpose so there was a settled surface area to index. One fuzzy-search overlay covers app actions, every settings page jumping straight to the right section via SettingsPanel.openSection , installed plugins toggle on/off inline , Prompt Library entries insert directly , and both installed and cached-marketplace Skills. Matching runs through a small hand-rolled fuzzy subsequence scorer core/command-palette.js 's fuzzyScore rather than a plain substring filter, so abbreviations and scattered-letter queries still rank sensibly instead of just failing to match; each result carries a small group tag — Action / Settings / Plugins / Prompts / Skills / Analytics — so you can tell at a glance what kind of thing you're about to trigger. Embedded Claude Code window tray → "Open Claude Code", File → "Open Claude Code" / "Open Claude Code in Folder…", Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K, or launched with --code — opens your real, already-installed Claude Code CLI inside a BetterClaude-owned window instead of handing you off to Terminal.app. The relationship is the same one lazygit has with git : electron/claude-cli.js resolves the claude executable the way a login shell would PATH first, then the usual user-level install locations, because a Dock-launched .app inherits a stripped-down PATH that wouldn't otherwise find it and spawns it in a real pseudo-terminal via node-pty ; ui/code-window/terminal.js renders that pty with xterm.js . Nothing about the CLI itself is reimplemented, wrapped, or intercepted — it is the authentic binary, and BetterClaude supplies only the window chrome around it. Because the terminal reads the same --bc- theme variables as the rest of the app, switching your active theme restyles it live without disturbing the running session, and the title bar's settings button opens the real settings panel scoped down to just the appearance sections electron/code-preload.js 's CODE WINDOW SECTIONS . The renderer runs with nodeIntegration: false : every byte of pty output crosses exactly one contextBridge surface, the only thing ever written to the child process's stdin is your own keystrokes forwarded verbatim, terminal output is never parsed to auto-trigger anything, and no auth token, session file, or credential is ever read anywhere along that path. Closing the window kills the child process. The spawn logic itself is a compliant port from the standalone BETTERCLAUDE OFFICIAL terminal-wrapper project, not a cross-import between the two. Full technical detail on every module above — exact file paths, IPC handler names, and what's persisted where — lives in docs/DESKTOP-APP.md /ara-mkr/BetterClaude/blob/main/docs/DESKTOP-APP.md . 80 built-in themes ship in themes/ .css , each a plain, readable stylesheet built on the same --bc- token set, so any of them can be copied and tweaked as a starting point for your own. On top of picking one outright, the Appearance Editor lets you hand-tune corner radius, spacing scale, font family, and every derived hover/active/disabled color state without writing CSS yourself — and for anyone who wants to go further than the editor's controls allow, there's a raw Custom CSS box underneath that layers directly on top of whatever theme is currently active. Whatever you land on, editor tweaks and all, saves as your own named theme alongside the built-in 80. The full built-in list, grouped roughly by mood rather than the alphabetical order they ship in: Editor-tunable defaults & neutrals — betterclaude-default, graphite, slate-mono, zinc, stone, mono-black, mono-white, porcelain, pearl, linen, quiet-sand Dark, high-contrast & terminal-flavored — dracula, nord, nordic, tokyo-night, gruvbox-dark, one-dark, monokai, night-owl, obsidian, hacker-green, neon-terminal, high-contrast, high-contrast-dark, high-contrast-light, crimson-night Vibrant & neon — cyberpunk, cyberpunk-neon, synthwave, vapor, vaporwave, infrared, electric-lime, secret-rainbow Cool & aquatic — arctic-glass, arctic-light, glacier, iceberg, deep-sea, ocean-abyss, oceanic, cobalt, denim, blueprint, mint-frost, raincloud Warm & earthy — bamboo, moss, forest-floor, forest-light, matcha, pistachio, sage-paper, walnut, coffee-house, ember, tangerine, honeycomb, warm-dusk, solar-dusk Soft & pastel — sakura-blossom, cherry-cola, coral-reef, cream-soda, rose-glass, rose-quartz, lavender-mist, orchid, plum-velvet, candy, aubergine Reading & paper-like — sepia-study, newspaper, catppuccin-mocha, aurora-ink, midnight-copper, midnight-violet, solarized-light, volcanic, clay, honeycomb Import a theme from a URL or a local file if someone shares one with you, or hit "Surprise Me" to shuffle through the full set if you'd rather not pick. Nine plugins ship in the box, each a plain .claudeplugin.js file in plugins/ you can open, read, edit, or replace outright — there's no compiled or minified plugin format to fight with, just a small manifest-plus-script convention that the built-in ones all follow. | Plugin | What it does | |---|---| | Focus Mode | Strips away everything on the page that isn't the active conversation — sidebar, nav chrome, the works — for a distraction-free reading/writing surface you can toggle in and out of instantly. | | Goal Tracker | A simple running checklist of goals pinned to the sidebar, so whatever you're actually trying to get done stays visible while you work instead of living in a separate app. | | Markdown Plus | Extra Markdown rendering on top of claude.ai's own, in both the composer while you're typing and in Claude's replies once they land. | | Pomodoro Timer | A small always-visible timer widget in the corner of the app for running focus/break cycles alongside a conversation. | | Quick Prompts | One-click buttons for the handful of prompts you type constantly, so they're a click away instead of a copy-paste from somewhere else. | | Quote of the Day | A rotating quote on the home screen — pure flavor, no functional dependency on anything else. | | Snippet Library | Reusable text snippets you can drop straight into the composer, separate from the full Prompt Library module for shorter, more disposable bits of text. | | Sticky Notes | Freeform notes that stay pinned to the app across sessions, for the stuff that doesn't belong in a conversation but you don't want to lose either. | | World Clock | A small multi-timezone clock widget, useful if you're coordinating with Claude or people across time zones. | core/plugin-loader.js is what actually loads these — built-in and custom alike, from the same userData/plugins directory, with no special-casing for the nine that ship by default. "Open Plugins Folder" in Settings takes you straight there in Finder/Explorer, and dropping in your own .claudeplugin.js file is enough for it to show up in the plugin list on next launch or a manual reload from Settings , ready to toggle on like any other. This is also exactly the mechanism Team/Shared Plugin Sync writes into, so a plugin distributed through a synced team repo and one you wrote yourself locally are indistinguishable to the loader. Small animated companions that live in the corner of the app while you work, defined in buddies/ : Astronaut, Detective, Scuba Diver, and Spartan. Each one has its own distinct typing, thinking, running, and flying animation state, driven by core/companion.js and core/buddies.js watching what's actually happening in the conversation — so the buddy visibly reacts moves, changes pose as Claude goes from idle to composing a reply and back, rather than just looping the same idle animation the whole time. Pick one, or none, from Settings; only one is active at a time. Things that don't need their own top-level section but are worth knowing about: Snake, while you wait. ui/mini-game/snake.js pops a small Snake board into the corner whenever Claude is actively generating a response, and it disappears on its own the moment the answer lands — no manual dismiss needed. There's a setting for how long a response has to run before the board shows up, so quick replies never trigger it in the first place. Sound effects for the moments that deserve them core/sound-engine.js — response complete, notification, that kind of thing — all individually optional and off entirely if you'd rather have silence. Motion and interaction touches scattered through the UI core/interaction-fx.js for click/hover feedback, core/motion-fx.js for transitions , the kind of detail that's easy to miss on first look and hard to unsee once you notice it's there. A weather widget core/weather.js , if you want one more small thing living in the corner of your screen alongside everything else. A built-in diff viewer core/diff-viewer.js for anything that needs a real side-by-side comparison, rather than reading a diff as flat text in a message. Overlay occlusion handling core/overlay-occlusion.js — BetterClaude's own overlays Command Palette, dashboards, pickers automatically suspend themselves when claude.ai opens one of its own modals on top, and vice versa, so the two layers never fight for the same click or stack incorrectly on top of each other. Every module's on/off state, and every setting inside it, is persisted through a single electron-store -backed JSON settings file — there's no scattered config across a dozen files, and no setting requires restarting the app to take effect. As a rule across every module documented above: Nothing is on by default that reaches outside your machine. Skill Marketplace, Team Sync, and Clipboard Bridge — the three modules that talk to something other than claude.ai GitHub, a git remote, a relay server — all ship off , and stay off until you both enable them and supply the endpoint repo URL, relay URL yourself. Local data stays local data. Usage Analytics writes to a SQLite file under userData/ ; Skills, plugins, and themes write to plain files under the same userData/ tree. None of it is uploaded anywhere by BetterClaude itself. Anything that does leave the machine is opt-in and end-to-end scoped to what you asked for — Clipboard Bridge encrypts client-side before a relay ever sees a byte; Skill Marketplace only ever reads public GitHub search results and repo contents you explicitly install; Team Sync only ever pulls from the exact git remote you configured.- Turning off every module returns the app to a plain themed wrapper around claude.ai; there's no "hidden" always-on component operating underneath the visible toggles. npm install npm run dev build the core bundle and launch Electron in dev mode npm start build the core bundle and launch Electron non-dev Packaged builds go through electron-builder https://www.electron.build/ , configured in the build field of package.json : npm run build:mac macOS: arm64 + x64, .dmg + .zip npm run build:mac:arm64 macOS: arm64 only npm run build:mac:intel macOS: x64 only npm run build:win Windows: x64 NSIS installer .exe npm run build:all everything above in one run Signed, notarized macOS output .dmg / .zip requires building on an actual Mac — Apple's build tools hdiutil , codesign , notarization aren't available on Linux or Windows. The Windows NSIS installer, by contrast, builds fine cross-platform from any host since electron-builder bundles its own NSIS tooling no Wine needed . Every build script runs build:core first the esbuild bundle step , so packaged output always ships whatever's currently in build/ .bundle.js — you never get a stale bundle in a fresh package. Output lands in dist/ : dist/BetterClaude-<version -arm64.dmg + .zip — macOS Apple Silicon dist/BetterClaude-<version -x64.dmg + .zip — macOS Intel dist/BetterClaude Setup <version .exe — Windows installer NSIS, lets the user pick an install directory, adds desktop + Start Menu shortcuts These builds are currently unsigned — there's no Apple Developer ID or Windows code-signing certificate wired up yet. In practice: macOS shows a Gatekeeper "app is damaged / unidentified developer" warning workaround: right-click → Open , and Windows shows a SmartScreen "Windows protected your PC" prompt workaround: "More info" → "Run anyway" . Neither is a bug so much as an unfinished distribution step — add signing identities to the mac / win build config plus the matching CSC LINK / CSC KEY PASSWORD env vars or the Windows equivalent before shipping this to people who shouldn't have to click through OS warnings. Updates are served straight from GitHub Releases — there's no backend server involved. build.publish in package.json points electron-updater at the repo, electron-builder writes a latest-mac.yml / latest.yml update feed next to the release artifacts, and the running app polls that feed directly. In the app itself: it checks for updates ~5 seconds after launch skippable via Settings → Appearance → Updates , plus on demand from that same settings section or Help → Check for Updates…. Nothing downloads automatically and nothing installs on quit — both steps always require an explicit click. An available update raises a dismissible bottom-right banner; "Later" suppresses just that one version, and the next release surfaces normally. Background check failures stay silent visible in Settings if you go looking , while a hand-triggered check always surfaces an error with an "Open Releases" fallback button. Signing directly limits how far auto-update can go today: on macOS, electron-updater verifies the downloaded build's code signature against the running app before installing, so an unsigned build downloads fine and then fails to install with a signature error — macOS auto-update effectively requires a Developer ID Application certificate plus notarization, and until that's configured, macOS users update by grabbing the new .dmg manually which is exactly why every update-check failure path offers that "Open Releases" button . Windows auto-update, by contrast, does work fully unsigned via NSIS — the only cost is a SmartScreen "unrecognized publisher" prompt on install until the build accumulates reputation or gets signed. Cutting a release is a manual sequence today no CI workflow yet : bump the version with npm version patch|minor|major refuses to run on a dirty tree, and writes both package.json and the matching git tag , push the commit and tag git push && git push --tags — the tag must be vX.Y.Z , since electron-builder derives the release from it and electron-updater matches on it , then build and publish every target in one step with GH TOKEN=<token with repo scope npm run build:core && npx electron-builder --mac --arm64 --x64 --win --x64 --publish always . The resulting release is created as a draft — the changelog you add to its body before publishing is exactly what the in-app "what's new" banner shows, stripped to plain text and capped at 160 characters. Issues and pull requests are welcome. If you're adding a plugin or a theme, look at an existing one in plugins/ or themes/ first — the format for both is small enough to copy from directly rather than build up from scratch. MIT, see LICENSE /ara-mkr/BetterClaude/blob/main/LICENSE .