ccview — a tiny TUI companion for Claude Code

I've been using Claude Code for almost everything lately — personal finances, research, side projects, the occasional half-baked startup idea at midnight. The output is genuinely great. The terminal is a genuinely terrible place to read it.

A 40-row markdown table wrapping into your scrollback is not information. It's wallpaper.

What I built

ccview is a small TUI app that watches a folder. Claude Code drops a JSON file. ccview renders it — tables, charts, checklists — right in your terminal, in a layout that's actually meant to be read. You can check items off. State persists between runs.

That's the whole thing. It's not a framework, it's not a platform, it doesn't try to be a chat UI. It's the missing render step between "Claude wrote a thing" and "I can use the thing."

Why a TUI and not a web app

The honest answer is that I live in my terminal and I didn't want to spawn a browser tab every time I asked Claude to plan something. A few less honest answers:

• A web UI would have meant building auth, hosting, a backend. A TUI is a single binary.
• Claude Code already drops files where you tell it to. Watching a folder is one syscall.
• The terminal is where the trust already is. I don't want a new surface for the output.

The trade-off is that you give up rich rendering — no embedded images, no fancy fonts. For the things I actually use Claude for, that hasn't mattered. A clean table and a checkable list cover 80% of it.

How it fits the loop

The pattern I've landed on:

1. Tell Claude what I want done.
2. Tell it to drop the output as a JSON file in ~/cc/.
3. ccview (already running in another tmux pane) picks it up and renders.
4. I check things off as I work through them. The state is there next time I open it.

Small enough to barely call a tool. Useful enough that I open it every day.

Code: github.com/aravs16/ccview. MIT, no telemetry, no install ceremony. Personal side project, not affiliated with my employer.