Blue Steel

01  What you get

The whole look, in one frame: the steel-blue block behind everything you type — your words never lost in the scroll — the live spinner, and the status bar pinned beneath it all, answering the question every multi-window session asks — “which project is this?” — with your project name in the synthwave magenta→cyan gradient of A3K, the Y3K Lab design language:

The percentage gauges — context-window usage and your five-hour and seven-day rate limits — colour themselves green → amber → red as they fill, so the colour is the warning. Session time and the active model ride along. Each gauge appears only once it has a value — and in a narrow terminal the bar sheds its quietest gauges first rather than overflow. (The demo above does the same: resize this window and watch.)

02  Install

One command

Paste this into your terminal:

The installer announces every file it touches, backs up your settings.json before merging in the three keys it needs, and touches nothing else. Piping a stranger's script into your shell deserves suspicion — read it first; half of it is the uninstaller and the banner art. Then restart Claude Code and you're done.

By hand

Prefer to place things yourself? Same result. Download blue-steel-kit.zip (5 KB — the status bar script, the theme, and a README with these same instructions). Unzip it, then from that folder, copy the two files into place:

Merge this into ~/.claude/settings.json (create the file if it doesn't exist):

Restart Claude Code. Done — the bar fills in as the session runs.

Requirements: the gauges need jq, which is built into macOS 15 and later; on anything older, brew install jq (without it you still get the gradient name, just no meters). Custom themes need a current Claude Code. Prefer the bar to ride along with the conversation instead of staying pinned at the bottom? Skip the "tui" line.

03  Update

Updating is the install command, run again — it fetches the latest files over the old ones and leaves your settings alone:

Installed by hand from the zip? Same idea: download the current kit and re-copy the two files — they're the only things that change. Either way, restart Claude Code to pick it up. There's no auto-update and no version to track; when you hear Blue Steel got better, this is the whole ritual.

04  Uninstall

Blue Steel touches exactly two files and three settings keys — nothing else, no background processes, no other state. One command removes all of it:

Restart Claude Code and you're back to stock. (By hand: delete the two files and remove the three keys from ~/.claude/settings.json — that's everything the installer did.)