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Desktop app: usage panel "Context window" row shows only absolute tokens, no percentage or limit #82215

Description

@Joanzhang45

Summary

In the Claude Desktop Code tab, the usage panel (opened by clicking the usage ring next to the model picker) shows a percentage for "5-hour limit" and "Weekly limit", but the "Context window" row shows only an absolute token count (e.g. 374.3k) with no percentage and no denominator. There is no way to tell how full the context window actually is.

Environment

  • OS: Windows 11
  • Claude Desktop shell: app-1.21459.3
  • Bundled claude-code: 2.1.209 (latest published is 2.1.220)
  • Plan: Max
  • Model: Opus 5 (1M context window)

Steps to reproduce

  1. Open Claude Desktop -> Code tab
  2. Click the usage ring next to the model picker
  3. Look at the "Context window" row

Actual

Context window 374.3k — absolute value only. The other rows in the same panel ("5-hour limit", "Weekly limit") each show a percentage and a progress bar.

Expected

The "Context window" row should show a percentage and/or the denominator (e.g. 374.3k / 1M — 37%), consistent with the other rows in the same panel. With a 1M context window this matters more, not less: 374.3k reads as "a lot" to a user who does not know the limit.

Why there is no workaround on Desktop

The usual workaround is a custom statusLine script, which can read context_window.used_percentage. The Desktop Code tab does not run statusLine at all — a configured statusLine command is silently ignored. Verified locally: the statusline script writes a cache file on every invocation; that file has not been touched since 2026-07-10 across many Desktop sessions, while the same script runs correctly when fed input manually. Desktop users therefore have no way to see context percentage anywhere in the UI.

Related: #41456 (feature request for a status bar in the Desktop app).

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