LimitBar

How much of your AI coding limits you've used — in the macOS menu bar. One glance for Claude Code, Codex, Gemini (Google Antigravity) and Grok Build; hover for the 5-hour and weekly windows and when they reset.

• Native and light. A Swift menu bar app, no Electron, no background browser. It asks each CLI only when that CLI has been used, so an idle Mac spends ~nothing.
• Never touches your credentials. LimitBar asks the official CLIs you already use. It never reads, stores or sends a token, cookie or password — sign-in stays inside each CLI.
• Only what you have. CLIs you don't have installed stay out of the menu bar.

Install

Paste this into your AI agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Grok…):

Install LimitBar by following https://github.com/dancik/limitbar/blob/main/INSTALL.md

Or run it yourself in Terminal:

d="$(mktemp -d)" && curl -fsSLo "$d/install.sh" https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dancik/limitbar/831be887b637875199b19e14a91b721b44048dd1/install.sh && bash "$d/install.sh"

The link is pinned to one commit, so the script you run is exactly the one you can read here. It downloads the release build, checks its SHA-256 against the digest written into that script, checks GitHub's build provenance when the GitHub CLI is installed and signed in, and copies LimitBar.app to /Applications, where Spotlight and Launchpad find it. Any admin account can write there without a password, the same as a drag-and-drop install; on a standard account it goes to ~/Applications instead. No sudo, nothing outside LimitBar.app, ~/Applications and ~/Library/Caches/limitbar.

/Applications is shared by every account on the Mac, and any admin account can replace an app there without a password — that is true of every app installed there, not only this one. If you'd rather keep LimitBar private to your account, run the last command as LIMITBAR_PER_USER=1 bash "$d/install.sh" and it goes to ~/Applications (Spotlight may not find it there).

Prefer to compile it yourself? bash "$d/install.sh" --from-source builds the same pinned commit on your Mac (needs Command Line Tools: xcode-select --install).

Requirements: macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon or Intel, and at least one of the CLIs below signed in.

Sign in to the CLIs you use

LimitBar shows whatever is installed in the standard places (~/.local/bin, /opt/homebrew/bin, /usr/local/bin, ~/.grok/bin, ~/.npm-global/bin, ~/.bun/bin, ~/.volta/bin). Sign in with the CLI itself — once:

Installed somewhere else? Point LimitBar at it: defaults write io.github.dancik.limitbar codexPath /full/path/to/codex (same for claudePath, agyPath, grokPath), then quit and reopen LimitBar.

Reading the menu bar

Hover (or click to pin) for every window, reset times, plan, and anything that needs attention — "Signed out — run codex login", for example.

Optional: free Claude readings from the status line

By default LimitBar runs claude -p /usage at most once every 20 minutes (no model call, ~3 s of CPU). If you want live Claude numbers at no cost, let Claude Code hand them over on every reply: add this to ~/.claude/settings.json (it replaces any status line you already have):

"statusLine": { "type": "command", "command": "~/Applications/LimitBar.app/Contents/MacOS/LimitBar --statusline" }

~/Applications/LimitBar.app works wherever LimitBar was installed: with the app in /Applications it is a link to it. It prints Claude Opus · 5h 23% · 7d 41% in Claude Code and saves only those percentages and reset times to ~/Library/Caches/limitbar/claude-status.json. LimitBar never edits your settings itself.

Security and privacy

LimitBar runs these commands, and nothing else:

The sandbox. codex, agy and grok run inside the macOS kernel sandbox profile Resources/cli.sb: each CLI can start no program outside its own install folder — so no MCP server, hook or plugin you configured runs — and can read or write nothing in your home folder but its own state folder (~/.codex, ~/.gemini, ~/.grok), nor other users' folders, mounted volumes or shared temp. agy additionally needs /usr/bin/security and your keychain (that is where its sign-in lives), /tmp (its local helper). Every CLI may still stat a path (Node and Go resolve paths that way) — that reveals whether a path exists, never its contents or a folder listing. If the sandbox is unavailable, the CLI is not run at all.

How it protects you:

• No credentials, ever. No token, cookie, keychain item or credential file is opened by LimitBar.
• Minimal environment. Each CLI gets only HOME, USER, LOGNAME, TMPDIR, LANG and a fixed PATH — none of your API keys, GitHub tokens or SSH agent socket.
• Only trustworthy executables. A CLI is run only if it and its real file are owned by you or root and not writable by group or others. Anything else shows as "not run" in the panel.
• Private working directory. CLIs run in an empty folder of LimitBar's own, never in a project.
• Hard limits. One CLI at a time, 20–40 s deadline, the whole process group killed afterwards.
• What it stores. ~/Library/Caches/limitbar/state.json (percentages, reset times, plan names; folder 0700, files 0600). No analytics, no network requests of its own.
• Tested. tests/claude-canary.sh proves canary hooks and MCP servers fire without the flags above and stay silent with them; tests/sandbox.sh proves the sandbox; tests/states.sh covers missing, signed-out and unsafe CLIs. CI runs them plus gitleaks on every push.
• Release builds are made by .github/workflows/release.yml on GitHub-hosted runners from the tagged commit, with a signed build provenance attestation. Check it yourself: gh attestation verify LimitBar-1.0.3.zip --repo dancik/limitbar.

The app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized (there is no paid Apple Developer ID behind it). Installed with the script, macOS opens it normally; a zip downloaded in a browser will be blocked by Gatekeeper — use the script or --from-source instead.

Found a problem? See SECURITY.md.

Uninstall

d="$(mktemp -d)" && curl -fsSLo "$d/install.sh" https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dancik/limitbar/831be887b637875199b19e14a91b721b44048dd1/install.sh && bash "$d/install.sh" --uninstall

or quit LimitBar from its panel and delete LimitBar from Applications, ~/Applications/LimitBar.app (if present) and ~/Library/Caches/limitbar.

Build and test

scripts/build-app.sh build                  # → build/LimitBar.app (native arch)
build/LimitBar.app/Contents/MacOS/LimitBar --probe   # what every CLI returns right now, as JSON
tests/states.sh build/LimitBar.app
tests/sandbox.sh
tests/claude-canary.sh                      # needs Claude Code installed; makes no model call

License

MIT. Service names and marks belong to their owners; LimitBar is not affiliated with Anthropic, Google, OpenAI or xAI. Icon credits: Resources/marks/README.md.