hook-my-lichess 0.1.3

A Claude Code hook that opens a Lichess puzzle in your terminal while Claude is working.

hook-my-lichess

A Lichess puzzle that floats over the same terminal Claude Code is running in. While Claude is working, the puzzle hovers in the top-right corner. You play moves by typing p:<move> as a prompt — including while Claude is mid-response — and the board updates live, no PTY proxy, no wrapper binary in the launch path.

How it works (v6, sidecar architecture)

Claude Code owns its terminal end-to-end. There is no wrapper. The overlay lives in a sibling process:

• Hook-launched daemon. A UserPromptSubmit hook calls hml-overlay start, which double-forks a Python daemon that opens /dev/tty for writes and emits Kitty graphics escapes. Claude is never resized, never has its I/O intercepted.
• Independent 16 ms redraw clock. The daemon re-emits kitty_place(image_id, p=1) on its own timer, decoupled from Claude's stdout — so the image snaps back above scrolls without waiting for Claude to emit a byte.
• Two input surfaces. A turn-boundary path via the UserPromptSubmit hook (p:<move> is intercepted with decision: "block" so the prompt never reaches Claude). And a mid-turn path via the daemon tailing Claude Code's session JSONL transcript at ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session>.jsonl for queue-operation enqueue and attachment.queued_command records — Claude Code logs queued user input the moment you type it, so the daemon dispatches mid-turn moves with no documented hook involvement at all. An 8-second dedup window swallows the duplicate when UserPromptSubmit later replays the same prompt.

See docs/v5-wrapper-vs-v6-sidecar.md for the full architecture comparison and the bugs that drove the rewrite.

Install

hook-my-lichess is distributed as a Claude Code plugin. Two slash commands and you're done.

Prereqs (one-time):

# uv runs the Python daemon on demand and caches it
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# Lichess personal token, see https://lichess.org/account/oauth/token
export LICHESS_TOKEN=lip_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   # add to your shell rc

Install in Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add 0JCRG0/hook-my-lichess
/plugin install hook-my-lichess@jcrg-tooling

That's it. The next prompt you submit will fire the hooks; uvx fetches hook-my-lichess from PyPI on first run (~2 s) and caches it. Subsequent invocations are instant.

The daemon auto-detects whether the terminal supports Kitty graphics (Ghostty / Kitty / WezTerm); on terminals that don't (iTerm2, Terminal.app, tmux), it exits silently — Claude works as normal.

Playing the puzzle

Submit any prompt to Claude. The board appears in the top-right within ~1 s.

Type a puzzle command as your prompt:

• p:e2e4 — submit a UCI move
• p:Nf3 — submit a SAN move (piece letters uppercase: Nf3, not nf3)
• p:hint — hint (which square the piece moves from)
• p:solve — give up and reveal the move
• p:quit — close the puzzle

The hook intercepts these (decision: "block") so Claude never sees them. You can also type them while Claude is mid-response — they'll queue, the daemon's transcript tailer will pick them up within ~100 ms, and the board updates without waiting for Claude's turn to finish. (Anything that doesn't start with p: passes through to Claude untouched.)

When Claude finishes its turn, the banner flips to "✓ Claude is done" and you can keep solving at your own pace.

Customizing the board (size & position)

Generate a default settings file:

uvx --from hook-my-lichess hml-overlay init-config
# wrote default settings to ~/.config/hml/settings.json

Edit ~/.config/hml/settings.json:

{
  "size": "xxl",
  "position": "center"
}

• size — one of "small" (0.75×), "medium" (1×, default), "large" (1.25×), "xl" (1.5×), "xxl" (2×), or any positive number for an exact scale (e.g. "size": 1.7).
• position — one of "top-right" (default), "top-left", "bottom-right", "bottom-left", "center", or a [row, col] pair for an exact 1-indexed cell (e.g. "position": [3, 80]).

The daemon checks three locations in order: $HML_CONFIG, then <cwd>/hml.json, then ~/.config/hml/settings.json. The per-user file is the one you usually want.

Developing locally

If you want to hack on the overlay itself instead of just using it:

git clone https://github.com/0JCRG0/hook-my-lichess
cd hook-my-lichess
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e .
cp .env.example .env   # put LICHESS_TOKEN here

The hooks in this repo's .claude/settings.json reference $CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR/hooks/*.sh, and those scripts prefer the local .venv/bin/hml-overlay over uvx when present — so working inside this repo always uses your in-tree code, no rebuild needed.

If you also have the marketplace plugin installed, disable it for this repo (/plugin disable hook-my-lichess) so hooks don't double-fire.

Force-enable the overlay (debugging)

Set HML_FORCE_OVERLAY=1 to bypass the terminal-detection heuristic and always emit Kitty graphics escapes.

HML_DEBUG=1 writes diagnostic lines to /tmp/hml-sidecar-debug.log.

Standalone puzzle (no Claude, no overlay)

Same engine, plain stdin loop:

.venv/bin/lichess-puzzle

Useful for exercising engine.py, board.py, api.py, render.py without touching the overlay code path.