clawd-spinner

A Claude Code mod: while Claude works, Clawd acts out the spinner word above the spinner line.

It won't use any of your usage. Every scene is drawn locally from code: no model calls, no tokens, no network. Your usage goes to the things that matter.

• Every one of Claude Code's 189 spinner words has its own scene: Baking slides bread into an oven, Beaming gets pulled up by a UFO, Gitifying draws a commit graph, Honking honks.
• A word a later Claude Code adds falls back to one of 11 general acts (cook, think, dance, build, …).
• Clawd talks about what he's doing, in a speech bubble beside his head that follows him around the scene and types itself out. He talks like Rocky from Project Hail Mary: a question ends in ", question?", a word said three times means a lot ("Hot hot hot."), and small words get dropped.
• Every word has ten lines of its own, 1,890 in all, and no two words share a line. Baking: "Oven very hot. Clawd wait." Gitifying: "Merge conflict, question? Ugh." He moves on to the next line every 10 seconds, starting somewhere different each turn. A word he has never seen gets twenty lines built around it ("Big word. Small Clawd. Defenestrating!").
• Rather have him quiet? /clawd-talk turns his speech bubble off (and on again); /clawd-talk off or /clawd-talk on sets it. The choice is remembered across sessions.

How a word picks its scene

Claude Code picks a random spinner word each turn. hooks/frame.ts looks the word up in hooks/scenes/ (one scene per word); an unknown word goes to actFor() in hooks/acts.ts, which matches stem lists (saut|whisk|brew… → cook, …).

His lines are in hooks/lines.ts (keyed by the word); hooks/rocky.ts picks one and holds the twenty for unseen words; bubble() in hooks/frame.ts draws it where clawd() last put him.

Install

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/saiharsha03/clawd-spinner.git
/plugin install clawd-spinner@clawd-spinner

Then /reload-plugins (or restart Claude Code). The HTTPS link works with or without SSH keys for GitHub; the short form saiharsha03/clawd-spinner may try SSH first. Or from a clone: claude --plugin-dir ./clawd-spinner.

To update: /plugin marketplace update clawd-spinner, then /plugin update clawd-spinner@clawd-spinner.

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or newer (mods are on by default from there). Terminal only, in a window at least 54 columns wide; narrower, the stock spinner shows. On Windows, a "Filename too long" error while adding the marketplace goes away after git config --global core.longpaths true.

What the hooks do

hooks/register.tsx hooks five events and only reads them; it never changes what they carry:

• session.start: in an interactive session, reads whether his speech is on, registers /clawd-talk, and starts a timer that repaints the animation about 12 times a second.
• command.run for /clawd-talk: turns his speech bubble off or on and remembers the choice.
• turn.start: notes when the turn began, so the scene's clock starts at 0 (a subagent's turn doesn't restart it).
• turn.complete: stops the animation when the main turn ends.
• ui.render on the Spinner component: draws Clawd, and his speech bubble, above the spinner line. Below 54 columns, or outside the terminal, it hands the spinner back to Claude Code unchanged.

Privacy: what data it sends

None. The mod reads only the spinner word and the turn's elapsed time that Claude Code hands it, and draws in the terminal. Every line Clawd says is written into the mod; none is generated. It makes no network requests, no model calls, reads and writes no files, and stores one thing: whether you turned his speech off (talk, in Claude Code's own plugin store). There is no remote server, so there is no privacy policy to link.

Develop

claude plugin validate .
claude plugin test .
npx tsx scripts/preview.ts preview.png Baking Beaming   # PNG contact sheet

/plugin-types .claude-plugin/types regenerates the editor typings (git-ignored).

Credits

Spinner word list: shanraisshan/claude-code-best-practice (reports/claude-spinner-verbs-and-tips.md). Clawd is Anthropic's mascot; this is an unofficial fan mod.

MIT licensed.