A desktop overlay for Claude Code

Every session
gets aan crab.

The crawlers live on a shelf along the bottom of the display you pick, and stay in view over every window, fullscreen apps included. One walks while its session works, waves at you when the session needs you, and curls up when the turn ends. Glance down and you know which terminal to go back to — or answer it right there, since a crawler asking for permission or putting a question to you carries the buttons in its bubble.

Download free See pricing

Free for macOS · Windows · Linux — Pro unlocks a crawler per project

A live shelf, drawn from the app's own sprites. Answer a crawler that asks, or click one to shoo it.

Crawlers

One glance, whole picture

A crawler's mood is its session's state. No notifications to dismiss, no window to keep open.

Walks while it works

Its bubble says what the session is doing right now: the file it is editing, the command it is running, and a running tally of the lines it changed.

Waves when it needs you

A permission request or a question sets it waving, and its bubble shows what it wants with the buttons to answer it. Destructive commands get a red bubble.

Curls up when it's done

When the turn ends the crawler settles down and dozes off, so the finished sessions are the quiet ones.

Subagents on a leash

Each subagent a session spawns is a little crawler of its own, held on a leash by its parent and sized by the model it runs on.

Not only crabs

Pick what your sessions are drawn as, from the crab to a growing cast of others. Every mood still reads the same, whoever is wearing it. Pick one here to redraw the whole page.

Answering

Answer from the shelf

When a session stops to ask, its crawler's bubble becomes the prompt. Press a button and Claude Code carries on, without you finding the terminal it is waiting in.

Allow or deny

A permission request shows the call the session wants to make, the command or the file, with Allow and Deny under it. It turns up the moment Claude Code is about to ask, not seconds later.

Pick an answer

When Claude puts a question to you, each option is a button. Several questions come one after another, and one that takes more than one answer lets you tick them and send.

The terminal still asks

Answering from the crawler is a shortcut, never a detour. Answer in the terminal instead, or close the app, and the request goes on exactly as it would have without it.

Speech · MCP connector Pro

Let a session talk

A Pro feature, in the same one-time purchase as a crawler per project.

Pressing Connect speech adds an MCP connector named crawlers to that setup's Claude Code, through claude mcp add, and allows its one tool, so a session can put a short line in its crawler's bubble. Disconnect removes both.

One tool, called `say`

The line travels over the hooks the app already installed, and stays up six seconds so you can read it before the work carries on past it.

Effects, sparingly

A word can wave, bounce, shake or go bold. Only a line said with say is read for effects; anything else a session prints is shown exactly as sent.

Nearly free, and free when off

About 270 tokens a request while it is on, read from cache after the first. Switch it off, for a setup or a single project, and the session is offered no tool at all.

Your screens

Always in view, on the screen you choose

The shelf sits above everything else, so a crawler asking for you is never hidden behind the window you are working in.

Over fullscreen apps

The shelf floats above every window and follows you across desktops and Spaces. Take your editor or a video fullscreen and the crawlers are still there along the bottom.

Pick the display

Pin the shelf to any connected display instead of the primary one. Send one project's crawlers, or one setup's, to a display of their own and the rest stay where they were.

Remembers where they go

Unplug a monitor and its crawlers fall back to the next display in line. Plug it back in and they walk home, even when you run two identical monitors side by side.

How it works

Nothing polls Claude Code

Every crawler is driven by hooks the app installs. Each hook runs the app's own binary in hook mode, which posts one line down a local socket and exits. The permission hook alone stays on the line, waiting for your answer. Speech is served by the same binary, in mcp mode (claude-crawlers mcp) — a stdio MCP server with one tool that only answers ok — and the line it sends still reaches the crawler over the hooks.

Claude Codehook
claude-crawlers --hooksocket
the appstate machinesnapshot
the overlaySvelte

Leaves your settings alone

Connect merges ten hook entries into a config directory's settings.json, keeps a backup, and never touches a hook of yours. Disconnect removes exactly those ten.

Never fails a session

Hook mode swallows panics and always exits 0. It prints nothing but the answer you gave a crawler, and when no answer comes, because the app is closed or you replied in the terminal, it prints nothing at all and Claude Code asks as it always would.

Knows its model

The model a session runs on and how full its context is come from the session's transcript, which no hook reports, and ride along in the bubble. The context figure turns from green to yellow, red and purple as the window fills, and shakes from 80%.

Per project Pro

A crawler per project

A Pro feature: $4 per computer, or $10 for three, paid once. Everything else on this page, bar speech, is free.

The free app gives every session the same crawler, styled once for the whole setup. Pro reads a .crawlers.json from each repository as well, so every project brings its own character, colour, size and habits, and you can tell your sessions apart from across the room.

Project files arrive with a clone, so they are treated as untrusted: colours must be #rrggbb, timings are clamped, symlinks are refused, and a setup can turn project overrides off entirely. Both files are watched, so an edit by hand applies within a second.

Get Pro, from $4

Pro

.crawlers.json

Pricing

Free to run. Pro to tell them apart.

Every crawler, every mood and every bubble are free. Pro adds a project of their own and something to say, for one purchase, not a subscription.

Free

A crawler for every session, on macOS, Windows and Linux
Subagents on the leash, bubbles, alerts and nudges
Answer permission requests and questions from the crawler
Always on top, on the display you choose
One look for all your sessions: character, colour, size and behaviour

Download

Pro one-time

$4 per computer, or 3 computers for $10

Everything in Free
A .crawlers.json per project: its own character, colour, size and habits
Commit it to the repo, and your whole team's crawlers match
Speech: sessions talk through their crawler, with a word that waves or shakes (an MCP connector you choose to add)
Updates included

Get Pro