Keycode Pet

A pixel character that lives on your desktop. It runs along the bottom of your screen over whatever you are working on — and the whole team can make every installed pet speak.

Download Install guide Source

macOS (Apple Silicon & Intel) · Windows · Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm)

Five frames of the pet: idle, running left, mid-jump, running right, and settled — Idle, running, mid-jump, running back, settled — one continuous stretch of pet life.

macOS builds are signed and notarized — open the .dmg and run normally. Windows may still show SmartScreen once (More info → Run anyway); there is no Authenticode certificate yet. Install instructions →

What it does

It talks

Publish a message and every installed pet says it — once each, whenever that machine next wakes up. A notification with no timeout waits until you click it, so an announcement cannot be missed by looking away.

The pet with a white speech bubble reading 'Deploy freeze starts at 5pm', with a dismiss cross

Put it anywhere

Drag it off the floor and it stays where you drop it, patrolling left and right at that height — and it is still there after a restart. Drop it near the bottom and it re-locks to the floor.

The pet placed mid-screen rather than along the bottom

Three sizes

Small, medium or large, from the right-click menu. Only the character scales — the speech bubble keeps its type size, because a message you cannot read is not a message.

A small pet with a full-size speech bubble above it

It looks after you

Water and stretch reminders, at intervals you choose. They are wall-clock deadlines rather than timers, so closing your laptop for two hours does not greet you with a backlog of four reminders on wake.

Or leave it be

Turn movement off and it settles down to sleep rather than freezing in place. Right-clicking the pet gives the same menu as the tray icon — which matters on Wayland, where the compositor swallows right-clicks and the tray is the only way in.

The pet asleep with animated z's rising from its head

For the team

Every pet polls manifest.json on this site once a minute. Publishing to it is how you reach everyone — and the easiest way needs nothing installed:

Actions → Notify → Run workflow

Or from a checkout:

pnpm notify "Keycode on Fire 🔥" --tone warning --expires 24h

Ids are generated. A message shows once per install, ever, keyed by its id — so reusing one silently shows nothing to anyone who already saw it.
An expiry is required. "Starting in 15 minutes" is wrong for whoever installs next week.
Publishing is a commit. Text that appears above everything on a colleague's screen goes through the same review as code.

The schema, every limit, and the nine fault modes →