Claude Swap Desktop

A Windows 11 tray companion for claude-swap. Left-click the tray icon for a glass popover showing every managed account's 5h / 7d quota with live reset countdowns; click an account to confirm and switch. Right-click for the full menu. The CLI stays the source of truth — this app shells out to cswap … --json and renders the result. Nothing about your accounts or credentials is ever stored here.

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Prerequisite: the claude-swap CLI

Claude Swap is a front end, not a credential store — it needs the claude-swap CLI installed and managing at least one account.

# 1. install the CLI (Python 3.12+ required; Claude Code must be installed and logged in)
uv tool install claude-swap        # recommended
# pipx install claude-swap         # alternative

# 2. add your first account (be logged into Claude Code with it)
cswap add

# 3. add the next account: open Claude Code, run /login and sign in with
#    the other account, then
cswap add

# 4. verify
cswap list

Note — when adding further accounts, never log out of an existing one (no /logout): Claude Code may revoke the refresh token stored for the account you are leaving.

The app auto-detects the CLI at launch on PATH and in the well-known install locations (~/.local/bin, the uv tool Scripts dir, Python Scripts, ~/.cargo/bin, looking for cswap / cswap.exe / claude-swap.exe / cswap.cmd). If it lives somewhere unusual, point Settings → CLI path at it.

Install

npm install
npm run dist      # builds the installer + portable .exe into dist/

Or run straight from source:

npm start

Screenshots

_{Default list view — 5h / 7d meters and reset countdowns  ·  Light theme}

_{Confirm sheet — warns about live Claude Code sessions  ·  Settings + about — detected CLI version and path}

What it does

Tray icon — a ring showing the active account's 5h usage, coloured green / amber / red by headroom, with the slot number in the middle. It is redrawn on every poll, so the taskbar alone tells you where you stand. Hover for a tooltip with both windows.

Popover (left-click) — one card per account: email, slot, organisation, and a meter for each of the 5h and 7d windows with a live countdown to reset. The 7d meter carries a tick marking where an even burn rate would have put you by now, and flags "ahead of pace" when you are over it. Click a non-active card to get a confirmation sheet, then switch.

Lock — the padlock in the header guards against a stray click switching your account. It is on by default: clicking a card while locked just says so and nudges the padlock, and the tray menu's switch entries grey out. Open the padlock to switch. Independent of "Confirm before switching", which is the second guard.

Resizing — drag any window edge, or the grip in the top-left corner (the popover hugs the tray corner, so it grows up and to the left). The card grid reflows as it widens: one column at the default width, two from about 560px, three from about 830px. Settings go two-column past 620px. Height stops fitting-to-content once you have sized it by hand; double-click the grip, or use Reset size in Settings or the tray menu, to go back to automatic.

Menu (right-click) — switch to a specific account or to whichever has the most headroom, refresh, open the dashboard, open the cswap TUI in a terminal, and every setting below.

Auto refresh — every 60s while the popover is open, every 5 minutes while it is hidden, plus on show, after any switch, and on wake from sleep. Countdowns tick locally every second between polls.

Settings

Reachable from the gear in the popover or the tray menu; stored in %APPDATA%\Claude Swap\settings.json.

Setting	Default	Notes
Backdrop	Acrylic	Windows 11 material: Acrylic (blurs the desktop), Mica, or Solid
Window opacity	97%	Whole-window transparency, 45–100%
Glass tint	55%	How strongly the panel is tinted over the backdrop — drop it for more see-through
Theme	Dark	Dark, Light, or follow the system
Start at login	off	Registers the app to start hidden in the tray
Always on top	on
Hide when it loses focus	on	Turn off, or hit the pin, to keep it open while you work
Lock switching	on	Blocks account switches until you open the padlock
Confirm before switching	on
Warn if Claude Code is running	on	Counts live sessions from ~/.claude/sessions and says so before switching
Colour the tray icon by usage	on	Off = monochrome ring
Refresh every	1 minute	30s – 10 minutes
Window size	fit to content	Set by dragging; Reset size returns to automatic

Rate limits

Anthropic's usage endpoint allows roughly 28–30 requests per hour per identity, and claude-swap paces itself against that: it keeps a shared usage store with a 180s serve-TTL and per-account nextPollAt. Because this app goes through the CLI, a fast refresh interval re-reads that cache rather than the API — every surface (this app, the TUI, cswap auto) shares one budget. Setting 30s here does not double your API traffic.

Layout

src/main/
  main.js        app lifecycle, tray, popover window, polling, IPC
  cswap.js       CLI bridge — spawn, JSON parse, error envelopes, in-flight dedupe
  tray-icon.js   the usage ring, re-rendered per poll at five scale factors
  sessions.js    live Claude Code session detection (~/.claude/sessions/*.json)
  settings.js    persisted settings with range clamping
  gfx.js         dependency-free PNG/ICO encoder + SDF rasteriser
  preload.js     context-isolated bridge
src/renderer/    popover UI (no framework, no runtime deps)
tools/
  gen-icons.js   regenerates build/icon.ico and build/icon.png
  capture.js     dev-only: composites a screenshot over a simulated acrylic desktop

Icons are generated from code, not checked in as art:

npm run icons

Dev

npm start -- --shot out.png                    # render the popover to a PNG and exit
npm start -- --shot out.png --view settings    # ...on the settings page
npm start -- --shot out.png --view confirm     # ...with the confirm sheet open
npm start -- --hidden                          # start in the tray without showing

There are no runtime dependencies; electron and electron-builder are the only devDependencies.

Credits

• claude-swap by realiti4 — the multi-account switcher this app wraps. It owns account management, credential storage, auto-switching, and the usage-rate pacing; Claude Swap only renders its --json output and sends cswap switch on your behalf. All CLI features (TUI, cswap auto, session mode, backups) keep working independently of this app.
• Electron for the windowing.

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MIT © 2026 Adithya N Raj · adithyanraj03@gmail.com