Claude Code is already a powerful coding assistant right in your terminal. But let’s be honest — the raw CLI experience can feel a bit… plain. No progress indicators, no visual feedback, just walls of text. If you’re spending hours chatting with it, a little polish goes a long way.
That’s where Gum comes in. It’s a tiny open-source tool from Charmbracelet that turns shell scripting into something you’d actually want to look at. With a few lines of bash, you can wrap Claude Code interactions with spin animations, progress bars, styled prompts, and even timeouts.
The beauty is — no config files, no plugins. You just pipe data in and out.
Here’s a quick example. Instead of running claude code "refactor this file" directly, wrap it with a spinner:
gum spin --spinner dot --title "Thinking..." -- claude code "refactor this file" You get a clean spinner while Claude works its magic, and when it’s done, the result appears normally. Simple but satisfying.
Need to ask a follow-up with a timeout? Use a styled input:
input=$(gum input --placeholder "Ask Claude something...") claude code "$input" You can even chain status messages with color:
gum style --foreground 212 "Claude is analyzing..." claude code "explain the architecture of this project" gum style --foreground 42 "Done!" The real power is in composing these together. Want to visualise a long code review with a progress bar? Feed line counts into gum progress. Want to confirm before sending a expensive prompt? Let gum confirm add a safety check.
And because it’s just a CLI tool, you can use it with any shell, any script, and any workflow. No strict ties to a particular editor or framework.
If you’re already using Claude Code regularly, adding gum is about as close to a free UX boost as you’ll get. One gum command installs it, and you can start dressing up your terminal sessions in a few minutes.
So go ahead — give your Claude Code a status bar it deserves. The assistant already writes great code; might as well make it look good doing it.