Documentation

Lineman runs a secondary LLM that compresses the data-heavy parts of your Claude Code session (large file reads, build output, logs), so your model spends its context on reasoning, not raw bytes. Everything below is what you need to install it, keep it up to date, and run it.

Install

One command. It installs the Lineman plugin into Claude Code, installs the lineman CLI, and opens a browser to sign you in. Run it once per machine. Your token is written to ~/.lineman/config.json and shared by every session on that machine.

npx @lineman-io/cli setup

Run Lineman

After setup, use Claude Code exactly as you do now: run claude and Lineman compresses every large tool result automatically. There's no extra prompt to write.

claude

To also get automatic context compaction (Lineman summarises your session before it hits Claude's native compaction wall, so long sessions keep more context), run lineman instead of claude.

lineman

Update

Brings both the plugin and the lineman CLI up to the latest version.

npx @lineman-io/cli update

Check your setup

Verifies the wiring on this machine (Claude Code on your PATH, the plugin installed, sign-in valid) and tells you exactly what to fix if something's off.

npx @lineman-io/cli doctor

Guides & resources

Last updated: June 2026