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Website: efimov.page/brow

Brow — Claude Code usage limits in the MacBook notch, and workspaces for parallel sessions

A macOS app for people who run Claude Code on several accounts at once. It does two things:

• The notch shows the usage and rate limits of every account: the 5-hour limit, the weekly limit, and when each resets. One click signs you in to an account in a browser profile that belongs to that account alone.
• Workspaces, in the menu bar, runs parallel Claude Code sessions on a product split across several repositories: one folder of git worktrees per feature, all on one branch, and a session moves to the account that still has room.

The notch is for looking, Workspaces is for working. Brow works with a single account too: it picks up ~/.claude by itself and shows that account's limits, and Workspaces stays off until you use it.

Download Brow for macOS or brew install --cask efim0v/tap/brow · macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon · install notes

Coming from Grove? Grove is now part of Brow. Brow finds your Grove projects and accounts and runs them in Workspaces; here is what changes.

Which account still has room

Hover the notch: every account's 5-hour and weekly limits open out of it. Copy an account's launch command and Claude Code starts as that account.

Glim, a pet that eats your limits

A small creature lives beside the 5-hour readout. Each time the number goes up it takes a bite, and its glow is its hunger meter. At the 5-hour limit it falls asleep full, at the weekly limit it hides in its den behind the camera, and it comes back out at the reset. Settings → General → Show the pet turns it off.

When each limit resets

The calendar marks every account's weekly resets and subscription renewals. Point at a day to see what frees up.

Sign in again in one click

When an account's sign-in expires, the key next to it starts claude auth login for that account and opens the browser profile that belongs to it, already signed in to that account. Other accounts stay signed in.

One branch across every repository

Workspaces gives each feature of a multi-repo product its own folder, with a git worktree of each repository on the same branch. Claude Code starts there and sees the whole product; ten features in flight are ten folders, and no session can change another's branch.

All demos and screenshots show made-up demo data.

What it does

In the notch:

• Every account at a glance. For each account: the 5-hour limit, the weekly limit and any model-specific weekly limit, as percent used, with the time until each resets.
• A reset calendar. Weekly resets and estimated subscription renewals on a month grid, so you can see which account frees up when.
• Limit warnings. Off by default. Turn them on and Brow posts a macOS notification when an account passes 80 % and 95 % of a limit, once per level until it resets.
• Glim, a pet that eats your limits. A small creature lives beside the notch and eats what your accounts use: when the 5-hour number goes up, it takes a bite. Hours at the Mac without Claude Code make it hungry; it never gets hungry while you are away. When the 5-hour limit is used up it falls asleep full until the window resets, and when the weekly limit is used up it hibernates until the weekly reset. On by default; Settings → General → Show the pet turns it off.
• Copy my week. One button copies a picture of your limits, ready to paste into a chat or a post. Accounts are numbered unless you choose to show their names, and emails never appear.
• Copy the launch command. One button copies the command that starts Claude Code as that account.
• Sign in again, in that account's own browser. Each account gets a separate browser profile — its own cookies, history and saved logins — so signing in to one never disturbs another. A second button opens that profile directly.
• Add an account in one click. Brow creates the account folder and opens Anthropic's own sign-in flow.
• Tokens kept fresh. Idle accounts are refreshed in the background, so the numbers do not go stale. An account a Claude Code session is using is left to that session, which refreshes its own token.

In Workspaces:

• A workspace per feature. One folder holding a git worktree of each repository you pick, all on one branch from your template. Shared files such as CLAUDE.md are seeded, each repository can run a post-create hook, and a workspace can fork from another one.
• Sessions across accounts. Resume as… continues a session under another account without copying, Migrate to… copies it in full, even into an account that is in use, and Share makes it visible to every linked account. Every account picker shows that account's limits, under the name you gave it in Settings → Accounts.
• Graph and statistics. The commit graph of each repository, and lines of code across the project over time.
• The brow command-line tool, with scan, workspaces, sessions, create, graph and doctor, each with --json.

Separate browser profiles need Google Chrome, Chromium, Brave or Edge. Without one of them links open in your default browser, with no isolation. More on the notch is in docs/brow.md, on Workspaces in docs/workspaces.md.

Collapsed, Brow shows two numbers beside the notch: how much of the 5-hour limit and of the weekly limit is used across your accounts. Hover and it opens into the panel above. The readouts can also sit in a strip below the notch:

What Brow does on your machine

Worth knowing before you run it. The notch:

• Brow reads Claude Code's sign-in token from the macOS Keychain and uses it only to call Anthropic's usage and profile endpoints. Those endpoints are not a documented public API and may change. No token is written to disk or logged, and nothing is sent anywhere else. If macOS withholds an account's token, that account shows a key; pressing it asks macOS for access.
• Brow looks at your running Claude Code processes when an account's token is due for a refresh or has been rejected, so that it never refreshes a token a session is using. It reads the command line of claude, node, bun and deno processes to tell which ones are Claude Code, takes nothing from their environment but CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, and checks when each account last saved a prompt (history.jsonl). The FAQ says why.
• The fallback token refresh is on by default. If the normal refresh stops working Brow runs a tiny claude -p request, which spends a little limit and starts that account's 5-hour window. Turn it off in Settings → Accounts; the FAQ says exactly when it runs.
• Each account's browser profile is a separate directory under ~/Library/Application Support/Brow/browser-profiles/. Brow sets the profile's name and allows third-party cookies in it so that sign-in works.
• Signing in opens Terminal with claude auth login; macOS asks once for permission to control Terminal.
• Brow marks Claude Code's first-run setup as done in account folders other than ~/.claude before it starts Claude Code in one: it sets hasCompletedOnboarding in that folder's .claude.json (and copies your theme if the folder has none), so the session doesn't open the onboarding wizard.
• With the pet on, Brow asks macOS to tell it when each account's history.jsonl is written, so the pet can perk up when you start Claude Code. It never reads the file. The pet's own state (its hunger, the last readings it has seen, the days it was fed) is in ~/Library/Application Support/Brow/pet.json.

Workspaces, only once you turn it on (or Brow finds Grove's settings):

• It edits an account's settings.json only if you turn on Capture the status line for that account in Settings → Accounts (accounts Grove already captured stay captured). It points statusLine.command at Brow's wrapper, which records each session's model, context use and limits, then passes the same input on to the command you had, so your own status line keeps working. Turning it off puts your command back. Claude Code keeps running the wrapper while Workspaces is off, so the switch stays in Settings → Accounts until you do.
• Sharing an account moves its session files into ~/.claude. Anything that would be overwritten is backed up under <account>/grove-backup/ first.
• The transcript safety net is off unless you turn it on (a Grove setup keeps its setting). When it is on, Brow keeps a hard link to every transcript under ~/.claude/grove/transcripts/. A transcript that vanishes is listed in Settings → Workspaces and comes back only when you press Restore. Nothing is kept longer than Claude Code keeps it: cleanupPeriodDays, the shortest that your organization's managed settings, the account's settings or the project settings of any folder its sessions ran in set — for a workspace shared between accounts, the shortest of all of theirs — and nothing within a day of that is offered back. The one period Brow cannot see is one passed to claude with --settings.
• It runs git in your repositories: git worktree add and a branch per repository when you create a workspace, and the post-create hooks you configured. It never deletes a worktree or a branch on its own.
• It drives cmux: through cmux's socket, with the password from ~/.config/cmux/cmux.json when cmux asks for one, and through AppleScript, which macOS asks you to allow once.
• --dangerously-skip-permissions only when you ask, per project or per launch.

Uninstall shows how to reverse all of it.

This is an independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later; the prebuilt app is Apple silicon only. The notch layout is for MacBooks with a notch; on other displays Brow shows a pill.
• Xcode with Swift 6.4 or later, to build (Swift 6.2 cannot compile BrowKit).
• Claude Code.
• For separate browser profiles: Chrome, Chromium, Brave or Edge.
• For Workspaces: git, and a terminal for the sessions — cmux, recommended, or Terminal.app (the difference). Cross-account resume and the transcript safety net need an account signed in at the default ~/.claude.

Install

brew install --cask efim0v/tap/brow     # the app
brew install efim0v/tap/brow-cli        # the brow command-line tool, if you want it

Or download Brow.zip from the latest release, unzip it and move Brow.app to /Applications. The release also has brow-cli.zip, the command-line tool (with grove as a second name for it), and SHA256SUMS.txt: with the downloads in one folder, run shasum -a 256 -c --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS.txt.

The build is signed ad hoc and is not notarized by Apple, so macOS blocks the first launch whichever way you installed it. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, find the message about Brow and press Open Anyway — or clear the quarantine flag yourself:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Brow.app

The brow tool from brow-cli.zip carries the same flag when you download it in a browser: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine brow.

If macOS withholds an account's Keychain item from Brow, that account shows an orange key and Settings → Accounts lists its token as Keychain access needed: press the key, or Grant Keychain access there, and choose Always Allow. Because the build is signed ad hoc, the key can come back after you update to a newer build.

Brow has no Dock icon: it lives in the notch, and its settings open from the ⚙ in the panel. Turn on Launch at login in Settings → General to start it when you log in. To start using Workspaces, open Settings → Workspaces, or press the stacked-squares button in the notch panel and choose Add project….

Coming from Grove

Grove's Workspaces engine is part of Brow from 0.4.0, merged with its history; the grove repository stays up, read-only, for older builds.

• Your setup comes along untouched. Brow finds ~/Library/Application Support/Grove/config.json and turns Workspaces on with your projects, accounts, captured status lines and safety-net settings. Nothing moves: the status-line wrappers stay in Grove/bin, where every captured account's settings.json points.
• The notch reads every account, Workspaces' too. Grove never read the Keychain or called Anthropic; the notch does, for every account it finds, the ones Workspaces knows included. It reads each account's sign-in from the Keychain (an account whose item macOS withholds shows an orange key: press it and choose Always Allow), asks Anthropic's usage endpoint for its limits, and keeps idle accounts' tokens fresh with claude doctor. If that fails, it falls back to a one-turn claude -p request, which spends a little of that account's limit and starts its 5-hour window; Settings → Accounts → Allow claude -p fallback turns that off. What Brow does on your machine has the rest.
• Quit Grove.app first. While it runs, Workspaces waits and offers Quit Grove, so the two never write the same files. Then delete Grove.app (or brew uninstall --cask grove), and if you had added it to Login Items, remove it there and turn on Launch at login in Brow instead.
• Where things went. The tree in the menu bar is now Brow's mark, the notch with two dots. The panel's settings screen moved to Settings → Workspaces; adding, sharing and capturing accounts moved to Settings → Accounts, where adding an account is Brow's one-click Sign in…. Per-project settings stay in the panel.
• The command-line tool is brow. brow-cli.zip installs brow with grove as a second name, so your scripts keep working unchanged. If you installed Grove's tool with Homebrew, run brew uninstall grove-cli before brew install efim0v/tap/brow-cli: both install a grove.
• The transcript safety net no longer puts transcripts back by itself. It used to restore any transcript under 90 days old on its own, including ones Claude Code's own clean-up had removed. Now it keeps nothing past Claude Code's retention, and Settings → Workspaces lists the transcripts that vanished, with Restore. So the transcripts older than cleanupPeriodDays (30 days unless you set it) that Grove kept putting back go at Claude Code's next clean-up, and the safety net drops its copies of them. To keep older sessions, raise cleanupPeriodDays in each account's settings.json before you switch.

FAQ

Does Brow use up my limits?

Only through the fallback token refresh, and you can turn that off. Reading the limits is a request to Anthropic's usage endpoint, not to a model, and an idle account's token is kept fresh with claude doctor, which makes no model call.

The fallback is on by default. When an account's token has 30 minutes or less left and claude doctor did not renew it, Brow runs a one-turn claude -p request on Haiku in that account. That spends a sliver of the account's limit and starts its 5-hour window. Brow skips it when Anthropic has rejected the token or claude doctor timed out or could not start, runs it at most once every 30 minutes per account, and stops using it for an account after three attempts in a row that did not help. Settings → Accounts → Allow claude -p fallback turns it off.

Does Brow refresh a token Claude Code is using?

No. Claude Code renews its token with a refresh token that changes on every renewal, so two renewals at about the same time can leave a session with a dead token and a request to run /login. Brow leaves alone any account with a running claude process for its folder (no CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR means ~/.claude), however long that session has sat idle, and any account with a prompt typed in the last 15 minutes. The session renews the token itself. Until it does, Settings → Accounts lists the token as in use by Claude Code, waiting for it to refresh. If the token has already expired, the panel shows Token in use by Claude Code instead of asking you to sign in, and the numbers come back once you use that session again or close it.

Where does Brow read my token, and does anything leave my Mac?

From the Keychain item Claude Code keeps for each account: Claude Code-credentials for ~/.claude, Claude Code-credentials-<hash> for any other account folder. Brow reads it with macOS's security tool and falls back to the Keychain API; with older Claude Code installs it reads .credentials.json in the account folder instead. It uses the access token only and leaves renewing it to Claude Code.

Brow's own network requests go to two Anthropic endpoints and nowhere else: api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage for the numbers and, about once a day per account, api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/profile for the renewal estimate in the calendar. Brow has no analytics and no update check. Workspaces makes no network requests of its own; the claude and git commands it runs make their usual connections, and the per-account browser profiles open claude.ai.

Which Macs does it run on, and where does it sit?

macOS 26 or later; the prebuilt app is Apple silicon only. Brow sits at the top of the main display. If that display has a notch, the two readouts sit beside it (the default) or in a strip below it: Settings → General → Ears. Turn off Show readouts next to the notch in the same tab and nothing is drawn until the pointer reaches the notch. When the main display has no notch, an external display for instance, Brow shows a pill at the top centre instead, and with the readouts off, nothing until the pointer reaches the top centre. If you use Brow for Workspaces only, turn off Show Brow in the notch and it draws nothing at the top of the screen at all; limit warnings still arrive.

Does the pet cost battery?

It draws only while the screen is on and you are at the Mac: 30 frames a second at rest, 60 to 120 for a second or two while it eats or moves, and nothing when the screen is locked or asleep, when you have been away for ten minutes, or when the pet is off. It follows Reduce Motion.

I don't see Brow's item in the menu bar.

On a MacBook with a notch, macOS hides the menu-bar items that don't fit beside it. Workspaces still opens from the stacked-squares button in the notch panel, from Show Workspaces in Brow's menu, and when you open Brow again from Finder or Spotlight. Settings → General → Show Workspaces in the menu bar turns the item off altogether.

Why not Claude Code's built-in worktrees?

claude --worktree gives one session a worktree of the repository you run it in, which may be all you need for a single repository. Workspaces are for a product split across repositories: one branch across all of them under one folder, your own branch names and start points, files and hooks set up on creation, and sessions that move between accounts. The longer answer.

Uninstall

1. If you used Workspaces, give each account its status line back first — the wrappers live in Brow's Grove folder, which step 4 deletes. In Settings → Accounts, turn off Capture the status line on every account that shows it; the switch is there whether Workspaces is on or off, and if Grove is still running, quit it first. Then check that no settings.json still points at the wrapper:

   find ~/.claude ~/.claude-accounts -maxdepth 2 -name settings.json -exec grep -l grove-statusline {} +

   For each file it lists, open the script that file's statusLine.command names: its GROVE_ORIG line holds the command you had before. Put that command back, or delete the statusLine key if GROVE_ORIG is empty.

2. If you turned on Launch at login, turn it off in Settings → General. Then quit Brow with ⌘Q while its Settings window is in front, or with Quit Brow in the Workspaces panel.

3. Delete the app: brew uninstall --cask efim0v/tap/brow and brew uninstall efim0v/tap/brow-cli, or move Brow.app and the brow tool to the Trash.

4. Close any browser window Brow opened for an account, then delete Brow's files: its settings, cached readings, the pet's state and per-account browser profiles (cookies and saved passwords included), Workspaces' folder (its config, the wrapper scripts, code statistics and the request-pacing file), and what macOS stored for Brow's network requests:

   rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Brow
   rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Grove
   rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/dev.artemefimov.brow ~/Library/HTTPStorages/dev.artemefimov.brow

   If you used Grove, defaults delete dev.artemefimov.grove3 removes its preferences too.

5. If you used Workspaces, delete what it kept in your account folders: ~/.claude/grove/ (the transcript safety net and the default account's status-line captures; the transcripts in each account's projects/ stay) and grove/ in every other account folder. Look through any grove-backup/ folder — what sharing set aside — before you delete it. A shared account's file-history, tasks and session-env, and projects/<workspace> for each shared workspace, are symbolic links into ~/.claude and keep working; docs/workspaces.md explains them.

6. If you added Brow's export BROWSER=… line to ~/.zshrc, remove it.

If you deleted the app first and Brow is still listed in System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions, remove it there. Account folders under ~/.claude-accounts belong to Claude Code and keep working without Brow. Workspaces are ordinary git worktrees and branches in your repositories, so they stay: remove one with git worktree remove on each of its worktrees, then delete its folder.

Build

git clone https://github.com/efim0v/brow.git
cd brow

Scripts/test-in-empty-home.sh   # the whole suite, with the home folder pointed at an empty one
Scripts/build-brow.sh           # -> dist/Brow.app and dist/brow
cp -R dist/Brow.app /Applications/

The app is signed ad hoc by default. macOS then forgets the Keychain and Automation permissions on every rebuild; to keep them, set BROW_SIGN_IDENTITY to your own Apple Development: Name (TEAMID) identity before building.

Layout

Path	What it is
Sources/GroveCore	Accounts, credentials, usage and token refresh; git, worktrees, cmux, Claude Code sessions, the shared store, the transcript safety net, migration, code statistics
Sources/GroveAppKit	The Workspaces panel and its state
Sources/BrowKit	The notch, the limits, the pet, Settings, and Brow's side of Workspaces
Sources/BrowApp	Entry point
Sources/brow-cli	The brow command-line tool
Resources	The app icon, the per-account browser router, the Info.plist template
Tests	About 1,550 tests
docs	The notch in detail, Workspaces, architecture, troubleshooting

There are no third-party dependencies. The module names GroveCore and GroveAppKit come from Grove, whose history this repository includes.

Development

• Scripts/test-in-empty-home.sh and Scripts/test-in-empty-home.sh -c release should both stay green; Scripts/check-warnings.sh should find no new warnings.
• swift run BrowApp --snapshot /tmp/brow-snap renders the Workspaces screens to PNG without starting the app; see docs/snapshot-testing.md.
• The screenshots in this README are regenerated with DEMO_SCREENSHOTS_DIR="$PWD/docs/screenshots" swift test --filter DemoScreenshotTests.
• The notch outline's tuning constants are in Sources/BrowKit/Panel/NotchGeometry.swift; they are meant to be tuned by eye against the physical bezel.

Credits

• boring.notch (GPL-3.0): the notch outline's constants, and the idea of drawing in a SkyLight space of its own so the panel stays put through Spaces changes.
• NotchNook: the same way of keeping a notch panel still across Spaces.
• cmux: the terminal Workspaces opens sessions in.
• Grove: Brow's companion app until 0.4, whose Workspaces engine is now part of Brow.

License

GNU GPL v3. Brow and Grove 0.2.0 and earlier were released under the MIT License.