Clautch

A macOS notch companion for dev teams. Pixel-art creatures live in your MacBook's notch and react to your Claude Code activity in real time. Create a room, share the code with your team, and watch everyone's creatures come alive.

Features

• Dynamic Island notch panel — click the notch to expand, click again to collapse
• Claude Code integration — creature reacts in real time: thinking, working, sleeping, compacting
• Visual state effects — thought bubbles, sparkle particles, floating z's, pulsing warnings
• Emotions — creature shows happy/sad reactions based on tool success or failure
• Team rooms — CloudKit-backed rooms with 8-char codes and invite tokens; see teammates' creatures
• Chat & reactions — send messages and pixel-art reactions to teammates via the room
• Activity feed — scrollable history of joins, leaves, chats, and reactions in the room view
• Push updates — CloudKit subscriptions for near-real-time peer sync
• Peer signing — Ed25519 signatures prevent impersonation in rooms
• Keychain storage — room invite tokens stored securely in macOS Keychain
• Day/night sky — time-of-day sky gradient with sunrise, sunset, and stars
• Creature interactions — creatures face toward each other, idle yawns and look-arounds
• Session tracking — menu bar shows active sessions with state icons
• Usage stats — daily and weekly session time with a bar chart
• Settings window — tabbed preferences for display, notifications, and general options
• Notifications — optional macOS alerts on session complete or tool errors
• Accessibility — VoiceOver labels on creatures, controls, and onboarding elements
• Launch at Login — one-click toggle in Settings
• Auto-updates — Sparkle integration for seamless updates
• 6 creature types — Ghost, Cat, Robot, Mushroom, Slime, Owl
• Color presets — Sky, Rose, Mint, Lavender, Lemon, Coral

Requirements

• macOS 14.0+ (Sonoma)
• MacBook with a notch (M1 Pro/Max 2021+, M2+ Air/Pro)
• Claude Code installed

Install

From DMG

Download the latest release from Releases, open the DMG, and drag Clautch to Applications.

Build from source

# Prerequisites: Xcode 16+, xcodegen
brew install xcodegen

# Clone and build
git clone https://github.com/sophiie-ai/clautch.git
cd clautch
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -scheme Clautch -configuration Debug build -allowProvisioningUpdates

# Or open in Xcode
open Clautch.xcodeproj

How it works

Architecture

Claude Code ──> Hook Scripts ──> Unix Socket ──> State Machine ──> Animated Sprites
                                                      │
                                                      └──> CloudKit ──> Room Peers

Event pipeline

1. On launch, Clautch installs hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json
2. Each Claude Code event triggers the hook script at ~/.claude/hooks/clautch-hook.sh
3. The hook sends JSON over a Unix socket (/tmp/clautch.sock) to the app
4. The state machine maps events to creature states:

Claude Code Event	Creature State
UserPromptSubmit	Thinking (yellow dots)
PreToolUse	Working (cyan sparkles)
PostToolUse	Thinking + emotion (happy/sad)
PreCompact	Compacting (pulse + warning)
Stop	Idle (wandering)
SessionEnd	Sleeping (floating z's)

Hooks

Clautch registers hooks for 8 Claude Code events. The hook script is pure bash with no Python dependency:

#!/bin/bash
SOCKET="/tmp/clautch.sock"
[ -S "$SOCKET" ] || exit 0
EVENT=$(cat)
echo "$EVENT" | nc -U "$SOCKET" 2>/dev/null
exit 0

Hooks auto-repair every 60 seconds if removed or overwritten.

Rooms

Create a room from the menu bar → Room. Share the invite code with teammates. Each person's creature appears on everyone's notch island, reflecting their Claude Code activity in real time.

• 8-character room codes with cryptographic invite tokens for secure access
• Invite tokens stored in macOS Keychain (you'll be prompted on first use)
• Peer signing via Ed25519 prevents others from impersonating your creature
• Push notifications via CloudKit subscriptions for near-real-time updates (polling fallback)
• Auto-expiry cleans up rooms with no active peers after 2 hours
• Offline handling — graceful reconnection when CloudKit is temporarily unreachable

Powered by CloudKit — no server required.

Deep links

Share room invites as clickable links using the clautch:// URL scheme:

clautch://join/ABCD1234-xYzInviteToken123

When opened, Clautch launches (or comes to front), joins the room, and opens the Room window. The format is clautch://join/CODE-TOKEN where CODE is the 8-character room code and TOKEN is the invite token.

Menu bar

The ghost icon in the menu bar provides:

• Active session list with state icons (brain, hammer, moon, etc.)
• Room management (create/join/leave, copy invite code, send reactions)
• Usage stats (today + this week)
• Creature customization
• Settings (Cmd+,) — display, notifications, and general preferences
• Check for Updates

Development

# Generate project
xcodegen generate

# Build debug
xcodebuild -scheme Clautch -configuration Debug build -allowProvisioningUpdates

# Build release DMG
./scripts/build-dmg.sh

# Notarize (requires notarytool profile)
NOTARIZE=1 ./scripts/build-dmg.sh

Project structure

Clautch/
├── AppDelegate.swift          # App lifecycle, window management
├── ClautchApp.swift           # SwiftUI entry point
├── Core/                      # Notch panel infrastructure
├── Views/                     # SwiftUI views + pixel creature renderer
├── Models/                    # Data models (sessions, creatures, events)
├── Services/                  # Hook installer, socket server, state machine
├── Networking/                # CloudKit rooms + peer sync
└── Resources/                 # Assets, hook script

License

MIT