A black capsule hangs from the top centre of your screen with two eyes. They blink, glance at your cursor, scan while Claude works, hop when it needs you, smile when the job is done and droop when it fails. Hover over it (or press Ctrl+Alt+P, Cmd+Alt+P on a Mac) and it unfolds into a panel.
Free and open source (MIT), no account, and nothing leaves your computer.
What it does
Claude Code, live
- The pill shows what Claude is doing right now: reading a file, editing, running a command.
- The Claude Code page has the session timer, the current step, a diff of the edit, command output, jobs done today and a model picker.
- Permission requests,
AskUserQuestion choices and plans appear in the island with Allow / Deny, so you don't have to keep checking the terminal. You can also reply after Claude stops.
- The header shows your 5-hour usage and a countdown to the reset.
Everything else, one hover away
| Page | What it does |
|---|
| Home | Claude's live state, what's playing, your running timer and the next reminder |
| Music | Now playing from Spotify, browsers and other media apps, with seek, skip and synced lyrics in the pill |
| Ask Pulse | Ask your own Claude Code anything, or use quick actions on your last copied text or a screenshot |
| Time | Focus sessions, named timers and a stopwatch |
| Plan | A quick note with tickable lines, and reminders in plain words ("in 20 min", "tomorrow 9am") |
| Launcher | Pin apps, folders and websites |
| Tray | Drop files on the island and drag them out later; swap files with your phone by QR code (local network only) |
| Clipboard | Recent copies, click to copy again |
Pick your own colours in Settings. The island's accent and body colours follow your theme.
Install
Download the latest build from pulse-bot.dev or the releases page.
- Windows: unzip
Pulse-win-x64.zip and open Pulse.exe. Pulse isn't code-signed yet, so Windows may say "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway.
- macOS: open
Pulse-mac-universal.dmg and drag Pulse to Applications. It isn't notarized yet, so the first time go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
Then open the island and choose Connect. Pulse adds its hooks (and, if you don't already have one, a status line) to ~/.claude/settings.json and keeps a backup next to it as settings.json.pulse-backup. Disconnect removes only Pulse's entries. Restart any Claude Code session that was already open.
Prefer not to run an unsigned binary? Build it yourself; it takes a few commands.
Privacy
Pulse has no account, no analytics and no server of its own.
- Claude Code reports to Pulse through hooks sent to
127.0.0.1:47900, a local-only address. Every request must carry a random per-install token (src/main/hub.js).
- Ask Pulse runs your own
claude -p, using the Claude Code login you already have. Pulse never sees a password or an API key.
- Lyrics look up the song title, artist and length on lrclib.net. You can turn this off in Settings.
- Update checks ask GitHub for the latest version number.
- Phone transfer serves files on your local network at a random URL that stops after an hour.
That's the full list, and the code is here to check.
Build it yourself
You need Node.js 22 or newer. Electron itself downloads the first time you run npm start.
git clone https://github.com/im-Amrith/Pulse.git
cd Pulse
npm install
npm start
npm test runs the tests (Node's built-in test runner, no extra setup).
Optional on Windows: npm run helper compiles the native media helper (src/native/PulseMedia.cs) with the C# compiler that ships with Windows; it needs the Windows 10/11 SDK. The helper uses about 20 MB of memory. Without it, Pulse falls back to a PowerShell bridge that uses about 90 MB.
Release builds: npm run release builds the Windows zip on a Windows PC.
Release zips are built on GitHub's machines, not on my computer. Pushing a v* tag runs windows.yml (Windows zip) and mac.yml (Mac .dmg) on GitHub Actions. Each run runs the tests, starts the built app once as a smoke test, and uploads the file with its .sha256. I check the build, then publish it to Pulse-releases by hand. You can compare a release's SHA-256 with the one in the workflow run that built it. (Up to 0.2.2 the Windows zip was built on my PC; the Windows workflow is used from the next release on.)
How it works
Claude Code ──hooks (HTTP + token)──▶ hub.js ──IPC──▶ renderer (the island)
▲ │
└──── pulse-reply.js (Stop hook) ◀──┘ your Allow / Deny / reply
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
