Customizing the Claude Code Spinner

Claude Code just added a spinnerVerbs setting that lets you customize the rotating status text shown while it’s working. By default, there are 52 gerunds that cycle through, but now you can replace them with your own.

For example, to set a static “Working” message instead of the rotating verbs, add this to your ~/.claude/settings.json file:

{
  "spinnerVerbs": {
    "mode": "replace",
    "verbs": ["Working"]
  }
}

Claude Code currently claims the mode option supports "append" to add your own to the rotation, but I wasn’t able to verify this. There’s an issue to add documentation that may reveal if appending is possible.

January 28th at 11:58 PM — ai, cli