Claude, at the edge of your screen.
Lichen is a small strip that sits against any edge of your screen. A ring shows how much of your Claude plan you’ve used. Click it to see every Claude Code session you have running, and jump to one.
Download for MacUnder 1 MB · macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon (M1 or newer). No Full Disk Access needed.
What it shows with nothing turned on
Plan usage
Your five-hour and weekly limits, read from the Claude desktop app on this Mac. No sign-in, nothing sent anywhere.
Sessions in progress
Every Claude Code session running now, what it was last asked, and whether it’s working or just finished. Click one to bring its terminal forward.
Any edge
Drag the strip to the top, bottom or either side. It snaps there and remembers. You can lock it in place from the menu.
On and off
Lichen lives in the menu bar, with no Dock icon. Click its mark to show or hide the strip; right-click for everything else.
Turn on only what you use
Each add-on comes inside the app and stays off until you turn it on: right-click the menu bar mark and open Add-ons. If one needs something installed first, the menu says what. Lichen restarts to add or remove one.
Mycelium
Shows what’s waiting for you in Mycelium with a badge, and lets you approve it straight from the strip.
You need: the Mycelium app, opened once on this Mac.
Ask about your screen
Press Control Option A and it takes a screenshot of what you’re
looking at and opens a chat with Claude about it. The screenshot goes to Claude.
macOS asks for Screen Recording the first time.
You need: Claude Code, Anthropic’s tool that runs in Terminal.
Search chats
Press Control Option Space to search every Claude chat and Claude Code
session you’ve had, then open or pick up the one you choose.
You need: a separate search tool installed first. For people comfortable installing developer tools; details below.
Meeting recorder
Records the room, turns speech into text on your Mac, and keeps live notes in a Google Doc while the meeting runs. The transcript goes to Claude to write the notes, and the notes go into your Doc.
You need: a separate recording script installed first. For people comfortable installing developer tools; details below.
What the last two add-ons look for
Search chats and the meeting recorder lean on tools that live outside Lichen. If you don’t already use the command line, you can skip these two; the rest of Lichen works without them.
- Search chats calls
chatdex, a separate command-line tool that indexes your Claude chats and Claude Code sessions on your Mac. - Meeting recorder runs a separate Node.js script at
~/.ebod-live/ebod-live.mjs, so it needs Node.js and that script. - Ask about your screen calls the
claudecommand. - Lichen looks for these in
~/.local/bin,/opt/homebrew/bin,/usr/local/binand yourPATH.
Three steps, about a minute
Download and unzip
Press Download, then double-click the .zip in your Downloads folder.
Move it to Applications
Drag Lichen into Applications in Finder, then open it.
Press “Open Anyway”, once
macOS says it can’t check the app. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security and press Open Anyway.
Lichen doesn’t need Full Disk Access. See pictures of each step.