dotclaude

Personal Claude Code configuration, version-controlled straight from ~/.claude. The .gitignore is a whitelist: everything is ignored except the paths it explicitly negates, because the rest of ~/.claude is runtime state (sessions, caches, credentials) that must never be committed.

Contents

• output-styles/adhd.md — action-first, no-preamble, plain-language output style. Adapted from ayghri/i-have-adhd (MIT): converted from a skill to a Claude Code output style, time-estimate rule dropped, list-cap rule replaced with rank-don't-cap, harness carve-outs added for agentic use (tool-call announcements, lead-with-outcome reports, handoff-only-when-it's-yours), plus a plain-language section covering word choice, consistent naming, sentence length, active voice, imperatives, self-contained references, and summary-before-detail.

Readability sources

The sentence rules (S1 to S5) narrow these standards to what applies to a technical reader in a terminal. The sources are listed here rather than in the style file — the style file holds only text that changes the output:

• ISO 24495-1:2023 — plain language, governing principles
• WCAG 2.1 SC 3.1.5 Reading Level, with techniques G153 (making text easier to read) and G86 (plain-language summary of complex text)
• Inclusion Europe, Information for all — European easy-to-read standards
• digital.gov plain language guide
• Plain English Campaign, How to write in plain English — source of the 15-to-20-word sentence average and the words-to-avoid list
• Harvard: designing for readability

Rules that govern visual presentation (font size, line spacing, contrast, column width) are out of scope — Claude Code does not control the terminal's rendering.

Install

This repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Native install:

claude plugin marketplace add cbini/dotclaude
claude plugin install dotclaude@dotclaude

The style then appears in the /config output-style picker as ADHD (the name in the file's frontmatter, not the filename). Claude Code keeps marketplace-installed plugins updated. Note that the settings value is namespaced — dotclaude:ADHD, not ADHD — see Use.

Manual alternative: copy output-styles/adhd.md into ~/.claude/output-styles/ (all projects) or .claude/output-styles/ (one project). Don't do both — two sources of the same style name.

Use

Select the style under /config → Output style, or set it directly in .claude/settings.local.json (per-project) or ~/.claude/settings.json (global). The value depends on how you installed it. After the plugin install above:

{ "outputStyle": "dotclaude:ADHD" }

Plugin-provided styles are namespaced plugin-name:style-name, so the bare frontmatter name does not resolve. After the manual copy into an output-styles/ directory, use the bare name instead:

{ "outputStyle": "ADHD" }

An unresolvable value fails silently — Claude Code falls back to the default style and logs no error, so a typo looks exactly like the style not loading.

The /output-style command was deprecated in Claude Code v2.1.73 and removed in v2.1.91; /config is the replacement. In the VS Code extension (checked on v2.1.220) /config takes key=value arguments with no interactive picker, and its outputStyle values are the built-in styles only — set a plugin style in settings there.

Two things to expect:

• The style is part of the system prompt, which Claude Code reads once at session start. A change takes effect after /clear or in a new session — editing the file mid-session does nothing until then.
• It applies to the main conversation only. Subagents run their own system prompt, so they answer in the default style. A fork is the exception, since it inherits the parent's full system prompt.

keep-coding-instructions: true in the frontmatter is deliberate: this style changes how Claude communicates, not how it codes, so Claude Code's built-in software-engineering instructions stay in place. Dropping that field would remove them.

Adding config to version control

Negate the path in .gitignore, then git add it. Keep the whitelist tight — when in doubt, leave it ignored.