glowup, a Claude Code theme mod with a side pane, activity band and pixel pet

glowup is a community mod by Aliasgar Khimani (NovusEdge), published in his glowup repository. It is a Claude Code theme mod that goes well beyond colors: it adds a pane for changed files, subagents and context, a one-line activity band above the prompt, packs and themes written as JSON, a status line you can arrange, and a pixel pet named Clawd.

The pane has five tabs. Changes lists the files Claude edited or created, with added and removed line counts from git. Diff shows those changes as hunks. Agents lists subagents with elapsed time, tokens and the tool each is running. Plan & context shows Claude's task list and a context bar split by source, with the auto-compact point and the heaviest sources you could trim. Music shows the track playing in the Spotify desktop app. Below the tabs a status box shows what Claude is doing and a row of hearts for the usage you have left.

When the pane is not docked, the band above the prompt shows a short summary while Claude works. The pane docks beside the transcript in fullscreen on a wide terminal. A pack sets colors, row style, border and spinner under one name. Four ship with the mod: classic, crt, cozy and arcade.

Use any of the methods in the install block; they install straight from the author's own marketplace. The author's README also offers a curl | sh installer; we did not use or review it, and you do not need it. glowup needs Claude Code 2.1.289 or later. After installing, run /glowup for the short list of commands.

glowup is one hooks module, hooks/register.tsx, plus about seventy helper modules and four small client modules for the field, pet, seek bar and spinner. It wraps tool.call, agent.spawn and the turn events to feed a model of what Claude is doing, and it redraws the pane, band, spinner and transcript rows from that model. This is how it learns that a permission dialog is open, from register.tsx:

on('classic.PermissionRequest', async ($, e, next) => {
  if (off) return next(e)
  // A hook below may answer the request itself, and then no dialog opens.
  const r = await next(e)
  if (!r?.decision && modeAsksPerson(e.permission_mode)) {
    const id = dialogCall(flying, e.tool_name, e.tool_input)
    if (id) feed($, { type: 'needs-you', at: Date.now(), toolUseId: id, what: approvalLabel(e.tool_name, (e.tool_input ?? {}) as Record<string, unknown>) })
  }
  return r
})

The hook returns the result unchanged; it only records that you are being asked. The status line takeover works through a shell script that prints a line glowup writes for the session, and falls back to your original command when that file is missing or more than 10 minutes old.

Settings appear in Claude Code's /plugin menu: theme, reduced motion, pack, spinner, pet, speech bubbles and the status line fields. The same choices are available as commands, such as /glowup pack arcade, /glowup theme, /glowup spinner, /glowup pet, /glowup color <role> <#hex> and /glowup statusline fields activity ctx / 5h week. /glowup config opens a settings screen in a new terminal window. The repository also ships a glowup-pack skill that lets Claude write a pack from a palette, an image or a description, saved under ~/.claude/glowup/packs.

We read the manifest, hooks/hooks.json, register.tsx and the helper modules for networking, processes, file writes and prompt text, the status line script, the bundled skill, package.json and the Go source of the installer. We did not read every helper module line by line, did not review the Go installer in full, and did not run the released installer binary or the curl | sh script. There are no install scripts and no minified code in the plugin. Here is what we found:

• Changes settings only after you agree. On first run, $.ui.ask asks whether glowup may draw your status line. Yes writes ~/.claude/glowup/statusline.sh, stores your old status line in the plugin store and edits settings.json (hooks/statusline.ts:80-100). No leaves it alone, and /glowup statusline restore undoes it.
• Runs commands. git for change counts, uname, date, rm, mv, curl, tar and sh for housekeeping and the installer download, osascript for Spotify on macOS and for opening a Terminal or iTerm window for /glowup config.
• Network. $.http.fetch is used for URLs you give it (packs, themes, pets, https only) and for the Spotify Web API (hooks/music/webapi.ts:4). The first /glowup config or Spotify login downloads glowup-installer and its checksums.txt from the author's GitHub releases and checks the SHA-256 (hooks/launch.ts:105-145). The checksum comes from the same release, so it detects a damaged download, not a hostile release. The Go source is in the repo under installer/.
• Writes go under ~/.claude/glowup/ (packs, themes, pets, status files, Spotify tokens with mode 0600 written by the helper) and the plugin store, plus settings.json as above. /glowup export konsole writes a Konsole color scheme.
• Model use. With bubbles set to haiku, one short call per turn at most goes to Claude Haiku. The prompt holds glowup state only (mood, pose, a capped label, test counts, time of day), not your prompts or file contents (hooks/bubbles.ts:56-66). The default is template lines with no model call.
• Prompts and tools. prompt.submit drops a pasted /glowup ... command and runs it itself. Other prompts pass through. The tool and permission hooks pass results through. No additionalContext and no hidden instructions were found.
• No daemon outlives Claude Code, and no telemetry was found.
• External requirements. The Spotify tab needs the Spotify app. Spotify's queue, likes and devices need Premium and a free developer app of your own.
• License. MIT, with a LICENSE file.

claude plugin validate reported no errors and one directory warning (no icon). It lists nine hooks without a .catch, such as tool.call and prompt.submit. claude plugin test ran 1,218 tests: 1,207 passed and 11 failed. Six failures are permission-alert tests that time out because the test engine has no clock.every implementation, and the other five are single tests for a Clawd state, an engine-refusal list, a seek-bar surface, a Friday sign and a pet sprite size. They run against a test engine, not the shipped mod.

Tested with Claude Code 2.1.310. The author's README says 2.1.289 or later. If glowup does not show up:

• Run /reload-plugins after installing into an open session.
• If you see Failed to load hooks ... expected record, received undefined, update Claude Code.
• The pane docks only in fullscreen on a wide terminal (144 columns, or 110 once you have opened it yourself). Otherwise you get the band, and /glowup pane opens a drawer above the prompt.
• If both an installed copy and a clone are loaded, the clone wins and the installed copy turns itself off.
• A project or local statusLine setting overrides the one glowup writes, so glowup's line will not show there.