Features

• A companion, not a notification. Every reminder is delivered by a small animated avatar that walks onto your screen and asks "Did you drink water?"
• Real answers. Reply Yes or Not yet — the avatar reacts, and HydraDev adapts: say "not yet" and it asks again shortly.
• Never nags. A configurable retry limit means HydraDev gives up gracefully and returns to its normal schedule instead of pestering you.
• Snooze and quiet hours. Push a reminder back, or silence everything overnight.
• Five avatars. A developer robot, a developer, a cat, a dog and a penguin.
• Multi-monitor, cross-platform. Windows 10+, macOS 12+ and modern Linux. The avatar always appears inside the display's work area, so it never hides under the Dock, the taskbar or a Linux panel.
• Accessible. Full keyboard support, screen-reader labels, high-contrast and prefers-reduced-motion support.
• Private and lightweight. No telemetry, no server, no account. Roughly 0 % CPU while idle — HydraDev only does work when a reminder is actually due.

How It Works

START
  │
  ├─ wait for the interval (default 2 hours)
  │
  ├─ the avatar walks onto the screen
  │
  └─ "Did you drink water?"
        │
        ├─ YES ──▶ celebrates ──▶ walks away ──▶ timer resets
        │
        ├─ NO  ──▶ looks sad ──▶ asks again in 1 minute ──┐
        │            ▲                                     │
        │            └─────────────────────────────────────┘
        │                  (until Yes, or the retry limit)
        │
        └─ SNOOZE ──▶ back in 10 min / 30 min / 1 h / 2 h

Sleeping on the laptop does not produce a backlog of missed reminders. HydraDev recalculates the schedule when your machine wakes and shows at most one reminder.

HydraDev is a reminder tool. It cannot measure how much water you actually drank. The statistics describe how often you answered the reminder.

Screenshots

The companion shows one of two things depending on your machine:

Configuration

All settings live under hydraDev.*.

Commands

Clicking the 💧 HydraDev status bar item opens a quick menu with the most common actions and a live countdown.

Avatars

Each avatar has artwork for every state — idle, walking, question, happy, sad, celebrating and sleeping — and all of it is generated procedurally from scripts/generate-assets.mjs, so the repository contains no opaque blobs. The Developer sprite is original vector artwork, not a copied stock image.

Companion modes

hydraDev.companionMode controls where the avatar appears:

• auto (default) — use the floating desktop companion when an Electron runtime is available, otherwise fall back to the in-editor companion.
• floating — prefer the floating window; still falls back rather than failing.
• webview — always use the in-editor companion.

In floating mode, the transparent companion window travels from the opposite edge of the selected display to its configured corner while the avatar walks. In webview mode, movement is confined to the VS Code panel.

Why the Marketplace build uses the in-editor companion. A true desktop overlay needs an embedded runtime. Bundling Electron would add roughly 250 MB to the VSIX, which is unacceptable for a reminder tool. The floating companion is therefore enabled when you run HydraDev from a source checkout (npm install provides the runtime) or when you point HYDRADEV_ELECTRON_PATH at an existing Electron binary. In every case the companion itself — the same HTML, CSS, JavaScript, animations, themes and accessibility features — is identical; only the host window differs.

Privacy

HydraDev is built to be boring about your data.

HydraDev never collects, reads, stores or transmits:

• your source code, file names or open editors
• keystrokes or clipboard contents
• browsing history, passwords or any personal files
• anything at all about you

What is stored, and where:

• Your settings, in VS Code's own settings store.
• A reminder counter per day, plus your last answer, in VS Code's local globalState on your machine.

There is no telemetry and no analytics. There is no backend, no database and no account. Everything works fully offline. Uninstalling the extension leaves no HydraDev data behind.

Performance

HydraDev is designed to be invisible until it is needed.

• No polling. There is no 1-second tick anywhere. Timers are single setTimeout calls that re-arm only when something actually changes.
• No duplicate loops. Every reminder goes through one centralised timer manager with named slots, so exactly one normal timer and at most one retry timer can exist — even across a window reload or a settings change.
• Lazy process start. The companion process is only launched when the first reminder is due. Before that, HydraDev costs a single timer.
• Idle means idle. While hidden, the companion stops all animations, clears its timers and releases its audio elements. The status bar countdown re-arms itself once per displayed minute rather than ticking every second.
• Compositor-friendly animation. Only transform and opacity are animated, and will-change is applied only while an animation is actually running.
• Predictable shutdown. Timers, windows, sockets, event listeners and media elements are all disposed on deactivation.

FAQ

Does HydraDev measure how much water I drink? No, and it never will. It is a reminder. The statistics measure how often you answered the reminder, which is labelled as such in the UI.

Why does the companion appear inside VS Code instead of over my desktop? Because a desktop overlay requires an embedded windowing runtime. See Companion modes. Running from source enables the floating version automatically.

Will it interrupt my typing? No. The floating companion window is explicitly non-focusable, so it never takes keyboard focus away from your editor. Clicks outside the avatar pass straight through to the application underneath.

Why did I get one reminder after being asleep instead of four? By design. On waking, HydraDev recalculates its schedule and shows at most one reminder rather than dumping every missed one on you.

Why did HydraDev stop asking after a few "not yet" answers? To stay out of your way. When the retry limit is reached it says "I'll remind you again later. Take care!" and returns to the normal schedule. Raise hydraDev.maxRetries, or set it to 0 for unlimited retries.

Can I disable the sounds? Yes — set hydraDev.soundEnabled to false. HydraDev never touches your system volume or mute state.

Does it respect reduced motion? Yes. Your OS prefers-reduced-motion setting is honoured automatically. You can also force it with hydraDev.reducedMotion, which swaps walking and bouncing for simple fades.

Where do the logs go? Run HydraDev: Open Settings and set hydraDev.logLevel to debug, then open the HydraDev output channel (View → Output, then pick HydraDev). Logs never contain source code, file names or any personal data.

Something is broken — how do I report it? Open an issue on GitHub with your OS, VS Code version and the output-channel log at debug level.

Development

Requirements

• Node.js 20 or newer (VS Code 1.85 ships Node 20; the extension targets it).
• npm 10 or newer.

Getting started

git clone https://github.com/hydradev/hydra-dev.git
cd hydra-dev
npm install
npm run build

Then press F5 in VS Code to launch the Extension Development Host.

To see the reminder without waiting two hours, set hydraDev.reminderInterval to 1 in the development host, or just run HydraDev: Test Reminder.

Scripts

Building and packaging

npm install
npm run build
npm run package

This produces hydra-dev-1.0.0.vsix in the project root, ready to install or publish:

code --install-extension hydra-dev-1.0.0.vsix

To publish to the Marketplace you need a publisher account and an Azure DevOps personal access token:

export VSCE_PAT=<your-token>
npx vsce publish --no-dependencies

Publishing is deliberately never automatic. The release.yml workflow only publishes when you push a v* tag whose version matches package.json.

Architecture

VS Code extension host (src/)
  │
  │  events (EventManager)          │  commands (CompanionHost interface)
  ▼                                 ▼
ReminderManager ──► CompanionManager ──► CompanionHost
  │                                        ├─ FloatingCompanion (detached Electron)
  └── TimerManager (named slots)           └─ WebviewCompanion (in-editor)

The extension host never imports the avatar UI directly — it only speaks the typed CompanionCommand / CompanionEvent protocol defined in src/types/index.ts.

Testing

npm test

The suite covers the timer invariants, the state machine, both answer flows, snooze, quiet hours, retry limits, sleep/wake, settings changes, persistence and migration, statistics, the companion lifecycle (including window reuse and destruction), the IPC framing, asset layout and the accessibility helpers.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please:

1. Open an issue first for anything substantial, so we can agree on the approach.
2. Run npm run verify before pushing — lint, types, tests and build must all pass.
3. Keep the privacy guarantees intact: no telemetry, no network calls, no reading anything the user did not ask about.
4. Add tests for new behaviour. Timer and state-machine changes in particular must keep the "no duplicate loops" guarantee intact.

License

MIT © HydraDev contributors

HydraDev is not medical advice. Drink water, and drink more of it if you need to.