A status line that looks good with a fresh session can fall apart three hours later, when the cost has four digits, the context window is nearly full and the branch has fourteen changed files. The preview in Statusline Studio lets you see all of that before you install anything.
Read the preview strip
The dark strip at the top of the studio is your status line, drawn the way Claude Code draws it, with the sample data of a session in progress: a model, a project folder, a git branch, a cost and the numbers of the context window.
Under it, four small badges count what you built:
| Badge | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| lines | How many lines your status line has (up to four) |
| cols | How wide the longest line is, in terminal columns |
| segments | How many segments you placed |
| deps | What the script needs on your machine, for example bash + jq |
Keep an eye on cols. If it is wider than your terminal, the line gets cut at the right edge.
Edit straight in the preview
The preview is not only a picture. You can work in it:
- Click a segment to open its editor under the layout
- Drag a segment to move it, also to another line
- Press Delete to remove the segment you clicked
This is often the quickest way to tidy a design: look at the line, click what is wrong, fix it.
Switch the session with Preview data
Open Preview data on the right. The four buttons at the top load a whole session at once:
| Scenario | Context | 5-hour limit | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresh | 2% | 4% | $0.08 |
| Working | 15% | 23% | $3.42 |
| Heavy | 68% | 71% | $18.40 |
| Near cap | 94% | 97% | $41.90 |
Click Near cap and watch the segments that change colour. A context bar or a limit shown in the heat colour turns from green to red as it fills, so this is where you check that the warning is visible.
Fine-tune the numbers
Under the scenarios are sliders for single values: Context, the 5-hour and 7-day limits, Cost, Resets in, Dirty files and Elapsed. Move one to see a single segment react, for example drag Context up and watch its bar fill and turn from green to red.
The switches below turn parts of a session on and off:
- Thinking and Fast mode show or hide the mode badges
- In a git repo turns git off, like opening Claude Code in a folder that is not a repository
- Pro/Max limits turns the plan limits off, like an API key user who has none
Turn In a git repo off and see which segments disappear. Git segments hide themselves outside a repository, and limit segments hide when there is no limit data, so your line never shows empty labels.
Check the width
Make the terminal in your head match the real one. Compare the cols badge with the width you really use (a split pane is often 80 to 100 columns). If the line is wider, remove a segment, shorten a format, or move some segments to a second line, which the lesson on multi-line layouts covers.
With the split or boxed line shape (in Theme, under Line shape), Terminal width sets where the preview draws the right edge. Set it to the width you really use to see where the segments pinned to the right land.
The next lesson goes through the segments themselves: what all 75 show and how to find the one you need.