glow

Drive a VIA/QMK keyboard's RGB from the host — and give your coding agent a physical presence on your desk.

glow sets your keyboard's RGB matrix to a solid color by talking to its VIA raw-HID interface directly. No firmware flashing, no VIA app open, no daemon — just a command:

glow purple
glow green
glow hue 96 # any hue on QMK's 0-255 wheel

It started as a joke — I bought a Keychron Q0 Mini, which is basically one giant key. Then I saw Work Louder x OpenAI's Co-Lab, where the keyboard's light reflects the AI's state, thought "huh, how hard could that beee," and this is the result: the big button now glows with what Claude is doing.

The Claude status lamp

Wire glow to Claude Code hooks and your keyboard becomes a live status light:

Claude Code event	color	meaning
SessionStart	purple	idle / ready
UserPromptSubmit	blue	working
Stop	green	your turn
Notification	orange	needs your input

Glance at it from across the room and you know Claude's state without looking at the screen. Add to ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
"hooks": {
"SessionStart": [{ "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "/path/to/glow/glow-hook purple" }] }],
"UserPromptSubmit": [{ "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "/path/to/glow/glow-hook blue" }] }],
"Stop": [{ "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "/path/to/glow/glow-hook green" }] }],
"Notification": [{ "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "/path/to/glow/glow-hook orange" }] }]
}
}

glow-hook runs glow backgrounded and never errors your session (an unplugged keyboard just does nothing). It's not Claude-specific — anything that can run a command can drive the light: CI status, a build, a pomodoro, a deploy.

Requirements

• A QMK keyboard with VIA + RGB matrix enabled (most Keychron Q/V/K boards qualify). glow talks to the VIA raw-HID interface (USB HID usage page 0xFF60), so nothing needs flashing.

• Python 3 with hidapi. The glow wrapper runs directly if hid imports, otherwise falls back to a nix-shell -p that provides it.

• Permission to open the raw HID device. On Linux the device is usually root-owned; add a udev rule for your keyboard's vendor id, e.g.:

  # /etc/udev/rules.d/99-glow.rules (replace 3434 with your vendor id)
  KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="3434", MODE="0660", GROUP="input", TAG+="uaccess"
  

  and be in the input group. Reload with udevadm control --reload && udevadm trigger.

Targeting your keyboard

Defaults target the Keychron Q0 Mini 8K (3434:040b). For another board, find its id with lsusb and set:

GLOW_VID=0x3434 GLOW_PID=0x040b glow purple

How it works

QMK's VIA feature exposes a raw-HID interface (usage page 0xFF60) that the VIA app uses to configure the board live. glow speaks the same protocol. To set a solid color it sends rgb_matrix commands:

report = [0x00, cmd, channel, value_id, ...args] # padded to 33 bytes
cmd 0x07 = set, 0x09 = save
channel 0x03 = rgb_matrix
value_id 1 = brightness, 2 = effect, 4 = color(hue, sat)
effect 1 = RGB_MATRIX_SOLID_COLOR

The one gotcha that cost an hour: value_id 3 is effect speed, not effect. Send the effect to id 3 and the color changes but the animation never stops — the effect id is 2 (see qmk/via.h).

License

MIT