Spinner verbs should be context-aware, not random

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Mar 11, 2026 by juliocleal13 Closed Mar 14, 2026

Problem

The spinner currently picks random creative words ("Coalescing", "Imagining", "Musing", "Dreaming") that don't reflect what Claude is actually doing. This creates cognitive noise — you look at the spinner expecting to understand the current state, but get a meaningless word instead.

Even with custom spinnerVerbs in settings.json, the selection is still random from the configured list. There's no way to make the verb match the actual activity.

Expected behavior

The spinner should show what Claude is actually doing:

  • "Thinking" when reasoning/generating a response
  • "Reading" when reading files
  • "Searching" when using Grep/Glob
  • "Editing" when editing files
  • "Running" when executing Bash commands

The tool call being executed is already known internally, so mapping it to a descriptive verb should be feasible.

Current workaround

Setting spinnerVerbs to a single generic word to avoid misleading text:

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

This works but loses all granularity about what's happening.

Why it matters

For users who spend hours daily in Claude Code, the spinner is a key feedback mechanism. Random creative words actively work against that — they look like status indicators but carry no information. Context-aware verbs would make the tool feel more transparent and professional.

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