ccswitch

Switch Claude Code between multiple accounts, from an animated terminal interface — with weekly, session and spend usage for each one.

Claude Code stores one login at a time. If you have a personal Max plan and a work seat, moving between them means logging out and logging back in every time. ccswitch saves each login once and swaps them in place afterwards, so switching takes a keystroke and no re-authentication.

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Install

Homebrew (macOS and Linux):

brew install edglz/tap/ccswitch

Go:

go install github.com/edglz/ccswitch/cmd/ccswitch@latest

Binary: download from Releases and put ccswitch on your PATH.

macOS, Linux and Windows are supported. To upgrade later:

brew upgrade ccswitch

Check it found your Claude Code install:

ccswitch doctor

credentials  macOS Keychain (Claude Code-credentials)
config       /Users/you/.claude.json
secrets      macOS Keychain
signed in    true

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Saving your first two accounts

This is the part that takes five minutes, once. After it, switching is instant.

ccswitch can only save the account you are currently signed into, because that is the only one whose token exists on this machine. So saving two accounts means signing into each one once, and saving it while it is active.

1. Quit Claude Code

claude auth status     # shows who you are signed in as

Quit any running claude session. ccswitch refuses to touch a live one, and for good reason — see Why it refuses while Claude Code is running.

2. Save the account you are already signed into

ccswitch save work

saved work (you@acme.com)

The name is yours to pick — work, personal, client-acme. Leave it out and the name is derived from the email address:

ccswitch save          # saves as "you", from you@acme.com

3. Sign out, and sign in with the second account

claude auth logout
claude auth login      # complete the browser flow as the OTHER account

4. Save that one too

ccswitch save personal

saved personal (me@example.com)

5. Done — check both are there

ccswitch list

   NAME      ACCOUNT          PLAN  LAST USED
   work      you@acme.com     max   never
*  personal  me@example.com   pro   never

The * marks the account Claude Code is signed into right now.

Repeat steps 3 and 4 for a third or fourth account. There is no limit.

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Daily use

From here on you never log in again.

ccswitch use work        # switch to the work account
claude                   # start Claude Code as work

Switch back whenever:

ccswitch use personal

Or run the interface and pick with the arrow keys:

ccswitch

All commands

Command	What it does
ccswitch	open the interactive interface
ccswitch list	list saved accounts, active one marked *
ccswitch current	show the active account and its remaining usage
ccswitch use <name>	switch to a saved account
ccswitch save [name]	save the account you are signed into now
ccswitch rm <name>	delete a saved account and its token
ccswitch rename <old> <new>	rename a saved account
ccswitch doctor	show where credentials and config live
ccswitch version	print the version

Add --force to use to switch while Claude Code is running. Read the warning below first.

Keys in the interface

Key	Action
↑ ↓	move between accounts
enter	switch to the highlighted account (asks to confirm)
s	save the account you are signed into now
d	delete the highlighted account (asks to confirm)
f	arm a forced switch, after one has been refused
r	reload
q	quit

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Keeping saved accounts working

Re-save an account if you log in again manually. Signing out and back in issues a new token; the copy ccswitch holds is then stale. Just run ccswitch save <name> again with that account active — it overwrites in place and keeps the name.

Switching away re-saves automatically. Claude Code rotates tokens in the background, so every ccswitch use re-reads the account you are leaving and updates its stored copy before swapping. You do not have to think about this; it is why a profile saved months ago still works, as long as you switch through ccswitch rather than logging out by hand.

If a saved account ever stops working, the fix is always the same: sign into it normally, then ccswitch save <name> over it.

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Usage numbers

The interface shows what Claude Code itself caches for the signed-in account:

• session (5h) and weekly rate-limit windows, with the time until reset
• per-model weekly limits, when your plan has them (weekly Opus)
• spend, when pay-as-you-go credits are enabled on the account

Two honesty rules are built in, because getting them wrong would make the numbers worse than useless:

• Usage for an account you are not signed into is labelled a snapshot, with its age. It is the last reading taken while that account was active, not a live number. ccswitch never contacts Anthropic, so there is no way for it to know the current figure for an account that is not logged in.
• The this machine line counts tokens across every account, because that is how Claude Code records them. It is never presented as one account's usage.

To refresh an account's numbers, switch to it and run Claude Code once.

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Why it refuses while Claude Code is running

ccswitch: Claude Code is running (pid [1601]); quit it first or pass --force

This is not caution for its own sake. Claude Code keeps ~/.claude.json in memory and rewrites the whole file when it exits. Switch underneath a live session and that final write puts the old account identity back, while the credential store still holds the new account's token. The two disagree, and Claude Code starts failing in ways that look like a broken login rather than a bad switch.

Quit Claude Code, then switch. --force exists for when you know the session is idle and about to be killed anyway.

The check matches the process named exactly claude. The macOS desktop app runs as Claude, with a capital C, and does not hold these credentials, so it is deliberately not matched.

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Where things live

What	macOS	Linux / Windows
Claude Code's live login	Keychain, service Claude Code-credentials	~/.claude/.credentials.json
Claude Code's identity	~/.claude.json	same
Saved logins (secret)	Keychain, service ccswitch	~/.ccswitch/secrets/ (0600)
Saved logins (metadata)	~/.ccswitch/profiles/ (0600)	same
Config backups	~/.ccswitch/backups/	same

Environment variables

Variable	Effect
CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR	Claude Code's config directory. Honoured, so a non-standard install works.
CCSWITCH_HOME	Where this tool keeps profiles, secrets and backups. Default ~/.ccswitch.
CCSWITCH_CREDENTIALS_BACKEND	file or keychain. Forces which store Claude Code's live login is read from and written to.

What a switch actually touches

ccswitch rewrites exactly three things:

1. claudeAiOauth inside the credential blob — not the rest of it. Your mcpOAuth sessions (Figma, Expo, and any other MCP server) belong to the machine, not the account, and are written back untouched. Copying the whole blob, which is the obvious implementation, silently signs you out of every MCP server on each switch.
2. oauthAccount and userID in ~/.claude.json.
3. Caches scoped to the old account, such as cachedUsageUtilization, which are deleted so the new account does not display the old one's limits.

Project history, MCP server config, permissions and onboarding state round-trip byte for byte. The previous ~/.claude.json is copied to ~/.ccswitch/backups/ before every write, and the last ten are kept.

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Security

Tokens go to the OS keyring where there is one, and to 0600 files where there is not — the same place Claude Code puts them on that platform. The metadata sidecar next to each profile holds no token, so it is safe to paste into a bug report.

There is one known weakness on macOS, written up in SECURITY.md: writing to the Keychain passes the secret as a command-line argument, briefly visible to other users on the same machine.

ccswitch makes no network requests of any kind.

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Build

just check     # gofmt, go vet, go test -race
just run       # run against your real install
just demo      # re-record the GIFs (needs vhs)
just snapshot  # build the release archives locally (needs goreleaser)

Releasing, including the Homebrew tap, is written up in RELEASING.md.

Or without just:

go test ./...
go build ./cmd/ccswitch

Layout

Ports and adapters. internal/core holds the domain types and the use cases and imports nothing from internal/adapter; every file, keyring, process and terminal concern is an adapter behind an interface in internal/core/port. That is why the switch logic is tested with fakes and never needs a real Keychain.

internal/
  core/domain    entities: accounts, profiles, credential blobs, usage
  core/port      the interfaces the core depends on
  core/service   use cases: capture, switch, list, remove
  adapter/
    keyring      macOS Keychain, and a 0600 file backend elsewhere
    credstore    Claude Code's live credential blob
    configjson   ~/.claude.json, rewritten losslessly
    vault        saved profiles: metadata on disk, secrets in the keyring
    procprobe    running Claude Code processes
    statsfile    local token and cost cache
    humanize     shared formatting
    tui          the interactive interface
    cli          the command line

The mark in the header is not ASCII art. The logo outline is embedded as SVG path data — the same geometry as .github/assets/logo.svg — and rasterised at runtime into quadrant block characters, so it stays true to the real shape at any size and can carry the animated colour pulse.

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Support

If this saves you some logins: buymeacoffee.com/edggdev

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Not affiliated with Anthropic. "Claude" is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC. The mark is used here to identify the tool this program works with.