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, take-your-own-next-step, handoff only when it's genuinely the reader's), 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 word, sentence, and line rules (W, S, and L) 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
• ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, Issue 9, by way of AminBlg/SimpleEnglish — source of the 3-word name limit (W4), simple tenses and the trailing "-ing" clause ban (S4), keeping articles, "that", and full negatives (S5), condition before command (S3), the 20-word ceiling on steps and the one-kind-of-item list rule (L1), and the paragraph bounds in O1. Its ban on should/may/might is deliberately not adopted: P2 requires a hedge when the uncertainty is real. Its ban on all phrasal verbs is not adopted either, because "set up" is the common word and W1 asks for the common word. Its approved-word dictionary does not transfer — the style has no word list to check against.

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.