glass

A desktop-app look for Claude Code's terminal transcript, as a mod.

glass-demo.mp4

Palettes

The same turn under each palette: pick one with /config under Glass.

tarnish glass's own. Metals aging: copper for what is happening now, the verdigris it weathers to for what has settled, brass strings, steel paths, tarnished silver for flags. Placed in OKLCH.

overprint glass's own. Risograph inks on black paper: fluorescent pink, aqua, yellow, orange, violet; the card tints are an ink overprinted on black. Loud by design.

ironbow glass's own. The thermal camera gradient, heat for activity: yellow verb, orange builtins, magenta flags, violet strings, cold-blue paths; done is cold, so the dots are blue.

lagoon glass's own. Daylight shallows: turquoise lead, sky, hibiscus flags, sun-yellow strings, sand paths, white-sand text. The bright one.

iris glass's own. The flower: indigo petals lead, leaf-underside teal, honey strings, orchid flags, sky paths; the neutrals carry an indigo cast.

tangerine glass's own. A warm lead on water's cool set: tangerine verb and tool names, water's cyan band and builtins, crimson's pink for your row and flags, lemon strings, periwinkle paths.

prism glass's own. A starship prompt's rainbow, each color in its segment's role: coral for you, orange paths, steel-cyan strings with coral JSON keys, emerald builtins, a blue verb, purple for Claude and the prompt box; neon green done, red failed.

prism-light glass's own, for a light terminal. prism by role on GitHub Light: each neon and pastel taken down along its own hue to 4.5:1, the yellow as a dark gold.

tangerine-light glass's own, for a light terminal. tangerine by role on GitHub Light: orange verb, cyan band, pink for you, the lemon strings as a dark gold.

tidepool (default) my nvim theme, mapped by role.

water Empryo's own proxysoul-water tokens.

crimson Empryo's crimson world, "the heart", from empryo.com's CSS.

codex One Dark.

What it draws

• Commands in color. Inside backticks and in plain prose: command, subcommand, flag, string, path, operator, number, variable, each in its own color. In prose a command paints only with evidence (git push --follow-tags paints, make sure the build passes does not).
• Paths and links anywhere. src/main.rs:42:7 with its line number in the number color, README.md, .gitignore, ~/.config/app.toml. URLs underlined; https links are real OSC 8 links.
• A Bottom line card. A reply opening with **Bottom line** (or **Bottom line:**) and Verified: / Issue: / Fix: rows becomes a tinted card with a thin bar and colored labels. Forms while streaming, never flickers.
• Gutter marks. A ▎ beside any paragraph that asks something of you: a question, an instruction, a risk, or a thing Claude did not do. Off for turns whose prompt asked for writing.
• Private notes. A paragraph opening with Private or Privately draws italic and quiet.
• Code cards. Fences on a tinted card sized to the code, a quiet language header, a line count and gutter past eight lines. glass's own highlighter does the coloring, in the palette's code keys; a shell fence takes the same colors as a command in prose.
• Diff cards. An Edit, Write or file-changing Bash result as a rounded card with the file in its top border, ╭─ SPEC.md +1 -1 ───╮: one number column, + and - rows on a quiet tint, one context line each side, the code painted the same way, the frame on the tree trunk.
• Pictures inline. A screenshot an MCP tool returns (chrome-devtools take_screenshot, a Figma screenshot) draws on the trunk under its row, so you see what Claude saw; so does an image file Claude reads, one per run of reads (the last; /expand shows them all), never one you named in your own prompt. JPEG, WebP and GIF are converted to PNG with macOS sips. Ghostty or kitty, plain or inside sluice. Inside tmux the row keeps its text, unless CLAUDE_CODE_FORCE_TERMINAL_IMAGES=1 says the pictures reach the terminal. Off by default, since a devtools run takes a screenshot each step: turn it on with /config glass.screenshots=true, or under Glass in /config.
• Headings, lists, quotes, tables. Bold colored headings with no rules, • ◦ ☐ ☑ markers, a quote bar, borderless tables with aligned columns and right-aligned numbers. A table a little too wide squeezes its widest column instead of falling back to boxes.
• Turn headers. ◆ You · 1:11 PM ──── as one titled rule over your prompt, then ◉ Claude · 1:14 PM once the turn starts, with a dots line under it: one dot per tool call, grouped by tool, green, a red ✗ for a failure, hollow while running, then Bash ×3 · Read ×2. Once done the line reads 5 actions · 2 edits · 1 failed. /fold tucks finished trees away and /unfold opens them.
• A tool tree. While a turn runs, every call is one row: ├─ ✓ Bash git status · 3 lines with its wall time at the right, ○ while it runs, ✗ in red when it fails. A Bash command keeps its colors once done; other arguments step down to a quiet color, and paths draw relative to the project. Rows light under the pointer. The engine's folded runs name what they read: ├─ ▸ Read ×2 SPEC.md · render.ts. Bash output is painted, three lines then a count. A finished agent is one row.
• Background band. While subagents run, a rounded frame above the prompt lists them with a face, model and effort, current tool, tokens and the file they last touched, five at a time. The chevron folds it to one strip of faces. A view at the end of each row opens that agent's transcript in the main view (Claude Code 2.1.300 or newer); the row in view reads back.
• Event rows. A background task's notification draws as one tree row with its duration; a message from another agent draws as one muted row.
• Summary rows. A compaction summary ends on a quiet · summary mark, as the engine's own does.
• Server tool rows. A tool the API ran inside the request (the advisor) has no tool call of its own; glass draws it after the reply as a quiet tree row with its duration.
• Themes. The diff card and the mode word under the prompt take the active theme's own slots, so they match the engine's panels under any theme. /glass-theme writes a theme built from the current palette to ~/.claude/themes/glass-<palette>.json; pick it in /theme (the engine lets a plugin select only its built-in themes). Then the prompt box, mode words, permission prompts and diff panels take the palette too. Switching the palette while a glass theme is active rewrites the file. Your own theme files are never touched.
• Notifications. A native notification when a background agent finishes after its turn ended, or a turn ends with failed calls. The engine already notifies when a turn finishes, so glass does not. Off with the notify option under Glass in /config.
• Fold and Copy. A chevron at the right of the dots line folds that turn's tree; ⧉ Copy takes the finished answer to the clipboard. /fold and /unfold do the same from the keyboard.

Every width is measured the way the engine measures cells, so emoji and CJK in tables stay aligned.

Install

claude plugin marketplace add rashedInt32/glass
claude plugin install glass@glass

Claude Code 2.1.295 or newer. On an older engine glass still loads: the notification falls back to a toast, summary and server tool rows need props that older engines do not send, and the rest is unchanged.

Inside tmux, set CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 (in env of ~/.claude/settings.json). Claude Code draws on tmux's main screen by default, and there a reply taller than the screen is printed twice: the engine draws the streamed text, glass redraws the finished reply, and the engine cannot reach rows already in scrollback. The fullscreen layout has no scrollback to strand them in.

Restart Claude Code. Pick a palette with /config under Glass: tidepool (default), tarnish, overprint, ironbow, lagoon, iris, tangerine and prism (glass's own), prism-light and tangerine-light (glass's own, for a light terminal), water (Empryo's own proxysoul-water tokens), crimson (Empryo's crimson world, "the heart", from empryo.com's own CSS) or codex. Every palette but the two -light ones assumes a dark terminal. The light pair is drawn for GitHub Light (#ffffff) and keeps 4.5:1 text on One Light, Solarized Light and Catppuccin Latte too; on Latte the card tint reads as the ground. Run /glass-theme after picking one so the engine's own panels take a light base.

To try it from a clone without installing:

claude --plugin-dir /path/to/glass

Design

SPEC.md is the contract: every element, its exact tree and colors, and the directions that were tried and rejected, with reasons. Settled through a design panel and an investigation against how Claude Desktop, the Codex app and T3 Code render chat.

The tidepool palette maps a neovim theme of the same name by role: strings olive, numbers and inline code pine, commands iris, builtins foam, paths gold, links mint.

Development

claude plugin validate .
npx -p typescript tsc -p .   # after the engine has laid .claude-plugin/types
claude plugin test .         # tests/*.test.ts, run in the engine's own sandbox
LC_ALL=C grep -rn '[^ -~]' hooks/   # must print nothing

scripts/check.sh runs all four and checks that both manifests carry the same version. scripts/demo-dump.sh before|after writes the text dumps DEMO.md compares, from tests/demo.test.ts. bun scripts/show.ts paints the fixtures before and after in the terminal, and bun scripts/readme-shots.ts shoots the palette screenshots above with headless Chrome; both draw through scripts/paint.ts. CI runs it on every push and pull request, without tsc: the types only exist once the engine has loaded the plugin. scripts/plain-ghostty.sh opens a Ghostty window outside tmux running Claude with this checkout (the installed glass off), to see screenshots as plain Ghostty draws them; GLASS_DEBUG=<file> adds a debug log.

Every non-ASCII glyph is built from a code point in hooks/glyphs.ts. Literals outside ASCII are forbidden in hooks/: the tool path that writes files has dropped private-use glyphs before.

License

MIT