How to make a custom Claude Code status line

Claude Code users can customize the CLI tool's status bar to display key information such as context window usage, session cost, Git branch, current model, effort level, and rate limit usage. The customization can be done through natural language prompts, allowing developers to optimize their workflow by keeping essential metrics visible in a single screen.

How to make a custom Claude Code status line The Claude Code status bar can be configured to show you useful information - I'll show you how If you’re using an agentic tool, every little optimization to your workflow pays dividends. For CLI tools like Claude Code, it can be a little hard to get all the info you might need in one screen. Fortuantely, Claude Code lets you configure the status bar to contain info that’s important to you, specifically. Some good options for the Claude Code status bar What kind of information might you want to display in the status line? Here are some popular ideas Context window usage Current session cost this is becoming increasingly important Git branch Current model Effort level Rate limit usage % There’s more options shown in the Claude Code documentation https://code.claude.com/docs/en/statusline available-data , but these are the most common. They also happen to be the ones that I use I’ll show you how to use Claude to configure the status line in natural language with a prompt you can copy and paste. How to customize the Claude Code status line with natural language Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to The AI-Augmented Engineer to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.