obscene-spinner

brew tap noctaIO/tap
brew install obscene-spinner
spin

That puts spin (and obscene-spinner) on your PATH. Newer Homebrew gates third-party taps, so if it asks, run brew trust noctaio/tap first.

Or skip Homebrew — it's one Python 3 file, no pip, no build, no config:

git clone https://github.com/noctaIO/obscene-spinner
cd obscene-spinner
./spin.py

Ctrl-C to stop.

The point isn't to watch it spin in a window — it's to drive the spinner Claude Code shows while it's working on your prompt. So run it bare and you get an arrow-key menu that sets your real spinner to whichever pack you pick: profanity or live news (still one file, still no dependencies — that's stdlib curses).

./spin.py                 # picker → applies your choice to ~/.claude/settings.json
./spin.py --verbs         # just watch the verb animation, ~0.6s each
./spin.py --news          # just watch the live-headline animation
./spin.py --set news      # apply a pack straight away, no menu (verbs|news|toggle)
./spin.py --status        # which pack is active right now
./spin.py --interval 0.3  # faster
./spin.py --once          # one verb and quit, handy for status lines

--set is the no-menu path: wire it to a shell alias or a Claude Code /spinner command and flip packs in one keystroke.

Picking profanity writes the eighty verbs into your spinnerVerbs; picking live news writes the latest markets headlines and a background poller keeps them fresh. The --verbs / --news flags don't touch your settings — they just run the standalone animation so you can preview a pack.

Claude Code lets you swap out its spinner verbs. The stock set is whimsical: "Noodling", "Lollygagging", "Shenaniganing". Pleasant. A little pleased with itself.

This is the other set. The one a senior dev mutters at 2am when the build is on fire: faffing, unfucking, yak-shaving, yeeting-to-prod, polishing-a-turd, crashing-out. Eighty of them.

There's a catch with the real spinner. It only swaps a verb when a new operation starts, so a whole session shows you maybe five of the eighty and none of the good ones. This one runs them on a timer instead, fast enough that the full pack actually goes past.

Put it in your real spinner

The picker does this for you — pick a pack and it writes spinnerVerbs into ~/.claude/settings.json (mode "replace", other settings untouched). If you'd rather do it by hand:

{
  "spinnerVerbs": { "mode": "replace", "verbs": ["faffing", "unfucking", "..."] }
}

The whole list is the VERBS array in spin.py; copy it straight across. Fair warning: "replace" throws out the polite defaults, so this is not the version you want on screen during a demo.

News mode

Same spinner, different pack: live news headlines instead of verbs. Pick live news in the menu and it becomes your Claude Code spinner. Out of the box it reads a live markets wire — the top Reuters market stories, refreshed every few minutes — one headline at a time, with the spinner animating on the left.

./spin.py --news                       # preview: ~5s per headline, refreshes in the background
./spin.py --news --interval 1.2        # faster churn
./spin.py --news --news-url URL        # or set SPIN_NEWS_URL — any {"items": [...]} JSON

Read the story: while the ticker runs, press n to pause and read the current headline's summary, then any key to resume (q quits). One catch — the summary only works in this standalone ticker, not in Claude Code's own spinner, which Claude Code draws itself.

Each headline is measured by real screen width — Chinese text and emoji count as two columns, accents as zero — then filled right to the edge and capped with …, recomputed every frame. So it never overflows or wraps, packs the line tight, and re-fits the instant you resize. Headlines are reshuffled like a deck, so you see the whole feed before any repeat.

Still Python 3 and nothing else — the feed is fetched with the standard library. The default is the markets wire, but point --news-url (or SPIN_NEWS_URL) at any small JSON endpoint shaped like {"items": ["headline", ...]} and it'll spin whatever you feed it. No network, no feed? It says so and exits instead of hanging.

The verbs

Roughly four moods, because a bad session moves through all of them:

• British disasters — faffing, bollocksing, fannying-about, going-tits-up, cocking-it-up
• Cope — malding, seething, huffing-copium, dissociating, crashing-out
• Honest engineering — yak-shaving, bikeshedding, monkeypatching, footgunning, kludging
• Do not do this in prod — yeeting-to-prod, force-pushing-to-main, rm-rf-ing, shipping-and-praying

A single frame, if the animation above won't play in your viewer:

The stock verbs are fine. But sometimes the honest status really is bodging, and the terminal may as well say so.