Tallybar

A live, glassy AI-usage gauge drawn directly onto your Windows taskbar.

Tallybar renders a small strip next to the clock showing how much of your AI coding-plan quota is left — a live sparkline, the current session percentage, and a countdown to the next reset. No window to open, no tab to check: the number you care about is just always there.

Supported providers: Claude, Codex (OpenAI), Copilot, Gemini, and Cursor — each read from the session that provider's own CLI or app already keeps on your machine.

Why on the taskbar?

Tray icons are 16 pixels of guesswork. Network monitors solved this decades ago by drawing straight onto the taskbar — Tallybar does the same for AI usage limits, so you can plan a long agent run around your reset window at a glance.

• Live sparkline of recent usage, colored by state: green → amber → red as the window fills (thresholds and colors are yours to change).
• Reset countdown (↻ 3h42m) plus the weekly window percentage; cycles between providers (Claude, Codex) or pins the one you pick.
• Click for detail: an acrylic popover with every usage window per provider — bars, percentages, and reset countdowns.
• Blends in: per-pixel-alpha rendering over the taskbar's own material, light/dark theme aware, hides automatically over fullscreen apps.
• Drag to place, drag edges to resize: slide the strip anywhere along the taskbar and pull its left/top edge to size it; both stick across restarts.
• Customizable: which items show, colors, thresholds, corner radius, opacity, animation style (pulse / gradient / rainbow), poll interval, launch at login, secondary-monitor strips — all in a live-preview settings flyout.
• Tray mini-gauge: the notification-area icon renders live usage bars, so the numbers survive even where the overlay can't attach.

Privacy

Tallybar has no backend and no telemetry. It reuses the sessions your tools already maintain locally and sends each token only to that vendor's own usage endpoint, storing nothing of its own:

Provider	Source
Claude	~/.claude/.credentials.json (Claude Code OAuth)
Codex	~/.codex/auth.json (codex CLI)
Copilot	gh auth token (GitHub CLI)
Gemini	~/.gemini/oauth_creds.json (gemini CLI; refreshed in place)
Cursor	%APPDATA%\Cursor\…\state.vscdb (Cursor app, read-only)

A provider simply shows "not configured" until its CLI/app is signed in. If a token has expired, run that tool once to refresh it.

Getting started

Requires Windows 10 (1809+) or Windows 11, and the .NET 10 SDK to build.

git clone https://github.com/Riyoway/Tallybar
cd Tallybar
dotnet run --project src/Tallybar.Strip

The strip appears just left of the clock after the first fetch (a few seconds).

scripts/dev.ps1 is a convenience wrapper — it stops any running instance (which otherwise locks the exe), builds, and launches. scripts/dev.ps1 -Probe instead prints each provider's usage to the console, handy for checking credentials without the UI.

Action	Effect
Click the strip (or tray icon)	Open the usage popover
Drag the strip	Move it along the taskbar (persisted)
Drag its left or top edge	Resize width / height (persisted)
Right-click the tray icon	Open · Settings · Refresh · Reset · Exit
Tallybar --probe	Print fetched usage to the console, no UI

Settings (tray icon → Settings…) cover providers, displayed items, theme, colors and thresholds, corner radius, opacity, animations, poll interval, launch at login, and strips on secondary taskbars. Changes apply live.

How it works

Windows 11 removed deskbands, so nothing can truly dock into the taskbar anymore. Tallybar instead keeps a borderless, per-pixel-alpha layered window glued over the taskbar surface:

• Anchors to Shell_TrayWnd / TrayNotifyWnd (stable on both Win10 and Win11, regardless of icon alignment) and repositions via a SetWinEventHook on the tray plus WM_DISPLAYCHANGE / WM_DPICHANGED / WM_SETTINGCHANGE.
• Re-attaches on the TaskbarCreated broadcast, so it survives Explorer restarts.
• Per-Monitor-V2 DPI aware; hides when SHQueryUserNotificationState reports a fullscreen app, mirroring the taskbar's own behavior.
• Usage is polled every 60 s with exponential backoff (to 30 min) on failure; the strip renders from a ring buffer and never blocks on the network. Failures keep the last known values on screen, marked stale — never a spinner on your taskbar.

Limitations

• Horizontal (bottom/top) taskbars only; vertical taskbars are not handled yet. Packaged, signed releases and more providers are on the roadmap.
• The overlay shares space with the tray area rather than reserving it — if it covers an icon, drag it somewhere emptier.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.