Quark — Codex Companion

Quark is a Clippy-style animated fox for VS Code. He makes machine output feel less abstract while remaining explicit that the animation is theatrical—not a mind, agent, or autonomous process.

Version 0.4.2 includes 824 literary entries. It preserves the original 637-entry collection and adds 78 sourced public-domain passages plus 109 verses from the Upanishads. Interpretive entries remain clearly displayed as thematic paraphrases so they cannot be mistaken for quotations.

Quark has nine separately animated poses: sit, blink, dance, combined chase/evade, console typing, stretch, tail spin, quantum leap, and meditation. Each pose has its own bleed-safe 3×3 sprite sheet with nine complete frames and generous transparent gutters. Quark stays in the current pose until you click him (or activate him with Enter/Space), then selects a different pose at random.

Install

1. In VS Code, open Extensions.
2. Choose the … menu, then Install from VSIX….
3. Select quark-codex-companion-0.4.2.vsix and reload VS Code.
4. Click the fox icon in the Activity Bar.

Use with Codex

• Copy a Codex response, then run Quark: Say Clipboard Text from the Command Palette.
• Select text in any editor and run Quark: Say Selected Text.
• Quark automatically reacts to saves, VS Code tasks, task exit codes, and visible diagnostics.
• Click Quark, press Enter/Space while he is focused, or run Quark: Next Literary Quote to draw the next shuffled entry.
• The timer uses the same shuffle and advances every five minutes. Every entry appears once before reshuffling, and progress survives VS Code restarts.
• Change the cycle with quark.quotes.enabled and quark.quotes.intervalMinutes.
• Optional spoken audio is off by default. Enable quark.voice.enabled in Settings.

VS Code does not expose another extension's private webview conversation to extensions. For that reason, Quark never scrapes Codex, logs keystrokes, or continuously watches the clipboard. The explicit clipboard command is the reliable privacy-preserving bridge.

Mental-model commands

• Quark: Explain Infinite Loops
• Quark: Explain Sudoku

Development

Open this folder in VS Code and press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host. Run npm test for the text-processing tests.