This editorial selection spans games, session visibility, safety and workflow tools from our catalog. It is a starting point for exploration, not a benchmark or security assessment. Repository requirements and licenses take precedence over this overview; daily community voting is tracked separately.
Use Claude Code 2.1.269+ as a baseline, check each repository for newer requirements, and enable CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS=1; the install guide covers that once.
1. cc-arcade — nine games and a pet above the prompt
The mod that made people notice function hooks. Run /arcade, pick Snake, Tetris, a Doom-style corridor shooter, 2048, Minesweeper, Flappy, Pong, a typing test or Space Invaders, and play while Claude works. The game pauses when the turn finishes. A pet grows alongside, fed by the tests Claude passes and the commits it makes. Zero tokens, no network, no files: it reads Bash commands only to spot test runs and keeps counters.
claude plugin marketplace add sezaakgun/cc-arcade
claude plugin install cc-arcade@cc-arcade2. Mindful Claude — breathe while it thinks
A community mod for the waiting time. While Claude works, a breathing animation appears above the prompt and the spinner counts along; pick coherent breathing, box breathing, 4-7-8 or a physiological sigh. It vanishes when the reply arrives. Nothing enters the transcript.
claude plugin marketplace add halluton/Mindful-Claude
claude plugin install mindful-claude@mindful-claude3. cctop — a btop for Claude Code
Context fill, tokens, cost, cache hit ratio, rate limits, per-tool latency, subagents and advisor tips, live, in a pane docked beside the transcript. If you run long sessions and want to know where the money goes, this is the one. Needs /tui fullscreen and a wide terminal for the docked pane; otherwise it uses a split.
brew install tomstagl/tap/cctop
claude plugin marketplace add tomstagl/cctop
claude plugin install cctop4. context-lens — one line that answers “how much room is left?”
A pinned line under the prompt with the context-window fill and its growth per turn, and a /context pane with per-category bars and turns left before compaction. Part of a four-mod repository built on the structure of Anthropic’s built-ins; its siblings quota-meter and token-ledger are worth installing at the same time.
claude plugin marketplace add Arunjay4213/claude-mods
claude plugin install context-lens@claude-mods5. secret-redactor — the model never sees the key
Swaps secrets, email addresses and IP addresses for stable placeholders before the model reads tool output, and restores them on the way into the next tool call. One of the first two function-hook plugins published, from before the feature had a name. Install from a clone with --plugin-dir, or via the marketplace in the same repository.
6. budget-guard — a hard stop on spend
Warns as the session approaches a cost or plan-window limit, then refuses tool calls and asks before the next prompt. /guard shows and sets the limits. This is the kind of guardrail a prompt cannot give you: a denied tool call is a denied tool call.
claude plugin marketplace add Arunjay4213/claude-mods
claude plugin install budget-guard@claude-mods7. claude-queue — type the next thing now
/q <text> while Claude is working queues a prompt in a reorderable stack above the input; each one is sent when the turn ends. Small, obvious in hindsight, and the kind of thing only a mod can do because it needs to know when the session is idle.
claude plugin marketplace add galElmalah/claude-queue-plugin
claude plugin install claude-queue@claude-queue-plugin8. cc-pr-tracker — your pull requests, pinned
Watched pull requests as lines above the prompt with merge state, review decision and required checks, plus a toast when one changes. From the author of cc-arcade; it runs gh to poll, so it needs the GitHub CLI logged in.
claude plugin marketplace add sezaakgun/cc-pr-tracker
claude plugin install cc-pr-tracker@cc-pr-tracker9. claude-mermaid — diagrams in the transcript
Every ```mermaid block Claude writes is drawn as colour box art in the transcript, right where the fence was. The first rendering mod, and a good demonstration that mods can change what Claude Code shows, not only add to it.
claude plugin marketplace add galElmalah/claude-mods
claude plugin install claude-mermaid@claude-mods10. Storytime — a 260K-parameter model narrates your session
A TinyStories transformer runs entirely inside the mod and writes a short story above the prompt about whatever Claude is working on. Absurd, delightful, and technically the most interesting entry on this list: a language model inside a plugin inside a terminal agent. Needs Claude Code 2.1.272+.
claude plugin marketplace add maddiedreese/cc-storytime
claude plugin install storytime@cc-storytimeHonourable mentions
Claude Slots turns the spinner into a slot machine. cc-dino is the Chrome dinosaur. aside gives you a read-only side chat about the session. agent-flow draws the subagent tree. lcm keeps every message reachable across compaction. And Anthropic’s own diff, sec-default and telemetry are the reference source everyone else copies.
How this list was made
We started from the GitHub issue thread where mods were announced, GitHub code search for hooks.json files with a modules entry, and the community’s awesome-list, and opened each repository to confirm it ships a hooks module. Ranking is editorial: usefulness, polish, and whether a visitor can install it in two commands today. Disagree? Every listing has a vote button, and the mod of the day is decided by those votes, not by us.