Guide

Claude Code session monitor for macOS

A Claude Code session monitor is a small macOS app — typically living in the MacBook notch or menu bar — that shows every active Claude Code session at a glance. The good ones replace alt-tabbing with a peripheral instrument you read the way you read a watch face.

Last updated: May 2026.

Why session monitoring matters once you run more than one

One Claude Code session in a terminal is easy to babysit. Two is manageable. By the time you're running four — auth refactor in one tab, payments tests in another, a database migration in a tmux pane, an API exploration in a fourth — the terminal stops scaling. You can't see status without clicking into each tab. You miss approvals. You batch-approve in a hurry and occasionally green-light something destructive.

A session monitor solves a single problem: making it possible to tell, without looking at the terminal, which of your sessions needs your attention right now. Done well, it adds zero cognitive overhead. You glance up, you know.

What to look for in a Claude Code session monitor

  1. 1

    Status per session, not just one global indicator

    If you run more than one Claude Code session, a single global "working" light is useless. You need a row per session with its own state: running, waiting for approval, idle, finished.

  2. 2

    Live without polling

    A good monitor reflects state within a second of it changing — driven by hooks fired inside Claude Code itself, not by reading log files every five seconds. The latter is fragile and burns battery.

  3. 3

    Full context on tool calls

    When a session waits for approval, the monitor should show the tool name, the input preview, and the last few completed tools. Without that you're approving blind.

  4. 4

    Per-session context window fill

    Claude Code reports usage per session in its own JSONL block. A monitor that reads that block can show you exactly how close to compaction each session is — not an estimate.

  5. 5

    Live plan usage from Anthropic

    Your 5-hour window and weekly limit drive how aggressively you can run sessions. A monitor that reads the Claude CLI's existing Keychain credentials surfaces those numbers without a second login.

  6. 6

    Safe defaults on batch approval

    If the monitor lets you approve multiple queued tools at once, it must exclude rm -rf, DROP TABLE, force-push, and similar — automatically. Anything else is a footgun.

How Claude Pulse implements all six

Claude Pulse is the Claude Code session monitor we built for ourselves. It hooks into Claude Code at the source —hooksfire from inside the running process — so state changes show up in the notch within a second. There is no polling.

Each session gets a row in the notch: a breathing status dot, a name, the current tool, and a faint underlay showing context window fill. The underlay is drawn from the Claude Code CLI's own JSONL usage block — never estimated — with per-model limits configured (1M for Opus 4.7 and Sonnet 4.6, 200k for Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5).

Plan usage — your 5-hour window and weekly limit — comes from the Claude CLI's existing Keychain credentials. macOS asks once when you click Connect; you click Always Allow; it's silent forever after. No second OAuth.

Batch approve excludes destructive commands automatically. If ten tool calls are queued and two of them arerm -rfand a force-push, Claude Pulse approves the safe eight and holds the two for manual confirmation. You don't have to opt in to that — it's the default.

The full feature list and how Claude Pulse compares against other Claude Code notch and menu-bar apps lives in the alternatives comparison.

Notch versus menu bar versus floating window

Three places a Claude Code session monitor can live: the notch, the menu bar, or a floating window. They are not equivalent.

The notch is visible in every Space, on every full-screen app, in every workflow. Your peripheral vision is already pointed at it. State changes register without conscious effort.

The menu bar is visible most of the time, but hidden by some full-screen apps and crowded by every other utility on your Mac. You glance at it less.

A floating window is a tab. You have to remember it exists, which defeats the whole point.

If you have a MacBook with a notch and you run Claude Code, the notch is the right surface. It's why we built Claude Pulse for that location.

Try Claude Pulse as your Claude Code session monitor.

Free. macOS 15+. Apple Silicon. No account.

Download for macOS

Or compare it against every other Claude Code notch app — see the full alternatives table.