I use Claude and Codex with more than one account: a work subscription and a personal one. Most weeks I hit a limit on one of them. The fix is always the same, switch to the other account, and it was always more annoying than it should be.
Claude Desktop has no account switcher at all. Signing in with a second account replaces the first. Claude Code in the terminal and Codex both have community tools that store several logins, but they live on the command line, and each one works differently. Three tools, three ways to switch, none of them one click.
So I put all three behind one menu bar icon.
What it does
Click the icon and you see every account for each tool, with a check next to the one in use and how much of its quota is gone. Click another account and you are on it. There is a shortcut to jump to the next account in each section, for the moment you hit a limit mid-task.
- Claude Desktop, including its Code tab. Claude keeps an account's whole login inside its data folder. Account Switcher keeps one folder per account: Claude quits, the folders trade places, and Claude reopens signed in as the other account, with that account's chats and settings back where they were.
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Claude Code in a terminal. A separate login from the desktop app, used by
claudein Terminal, iTerm and VS Code. The menu drives claude-swap for this. - Codex. The menu drives codex-auth. The Codex app only reads its login when it starts, so after a switch Account Switcher offers to restart it. Otherwise the switch looks like it did nothing, which is the confusing part of doing this by hand.
Keeping your Code sessions
The part I actually wanted. Codex keeps your chats when you change accounts. Claude Desktop's Code tab does not: its sessions are filed under the account that started them, so switching accounts means switching to an empty list.
The conversations themselves are already shared on disk; only the list is per account. Account Switcher keeps one list that every account sees, and moves it along with whichever account is active, so it always sits exactly where Claude expects it. Hit the limit on one account, switch, and carry on with the same Code session on the other. Regular chats stay with their account, because those live on Anthropic's servers.
When two accounts have the same file, it combines them where it can (scheduled tasks, archived sessions) and otherwise keeps the newer one. The other copy is moved aside, never deleted. That rule is the whole design: nothing it does to your folders throws data away.
Update to 1.1 if you shared sessions with 1.0. Version 1.0 had two bugs here: a newly added account could replace another account's scheduled tasks, and moving the shared folder made Claude Code split some conversations in two. 1.1 fixes both, and the first switch after updating repairs the split conversations.
Installing it
Open the DMG and drag Account Switcher to Applications. It is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized, so it opens normally. Or, from a terminal, one line that also installs the two helpers when their prerequisites are there:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berkboz/account-switcher/main/install.sh | zsh
On first launch a setup window lists the three tools, what is missing for each, and one button to fix it: install the helper, add an account, or get a prerequisite. Set up only the ones you use and hide the rest from the menu.
Windows
There is a Windows version too, with the same menu in the system tray and the same features. It is a preview: the switching logic is tested on Windows, but I have not yet confirmed the Claude Desktop switch on a real install. Install it from PowerShell, no admin rights needed:
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berkboz/account-switcher/main/windows/install.ps1 | iex
Or download the zip for your PC from the latest release. It is not code-signed yet, so a browser download shows a SmartScreen warning the first time.
Things to know
- It is unofficial. Anthropic does not support several accounts in Claude Desktop. This works with how the app stores its data today, and an update could change that.
- Switching Claude Desktop quits it. Running chats and Code sessions stop. They are still there when you come back.
- Open sessions keep the old login. A terminal Claude Code session or a running Codex app has to be restarted to use the new account.
Privacy
The app has no telemetry, no analytics and no account of its own, and it stores no passwords. Logins stay where each tool already keeps them: the Keychain for Claude Code, Codex's own file, and each account's data folder for Claude Desktop. The only network traffic is the helpers asking Anthropic and OpenAI for your usage, the same way the command-line tools do.
If something breaks
It is a young tool built around two companies' apps that change often. If a switch misbehaves, open an issue on GitHub or write to hello@brk.bz with what you clicked and what happened.