Roaming Pixel Cats

Three tiny pixel-art cats that live in your whole VS Code window, not in a panel. They walk along the edges of the sidebar, editor and panels, jump between them, climb up and slide down their sides, and nap on the status bar.

• Jexit, orange: sleepy, and fond of Erik.
• Erik, black: the everyday cat, and fond of Jexit.
• Boris, brown: lazy, and not much of a climber.

Friends now and then curl up to sleep next to each other.

Feeding: click the 🐟 in the status bar to throw the cats a fish. It lands near a cat, and an awake cat close by trots over and eats it. Sleeping cats ignore fish until they wake up. Up to 10 fish can lie around at once.

Hunger: the cats get hungrier as you work (full to starving in about 40 minutes), and each fish fills a cat halfway. A nearly full cat ignores fish; a hungry one asks for food now and then: a little fish floats up over its head, like the Zs.

Trust: each cat's trust in you (0 to 1, starting at 0.1) grows by 0.01 with every fish it eats, and drops by 0.01 for every 10 minutes it is left starving. It builds over weeks. Hunger and trust only change while VS Code is open, and are remembered across reloads.

⚠️ This extension modifies VS Code's files

VS Code doesn't let extensions draw outside their own panels. To let the cats roam the whole window, Pixel Cat adds one <script> tag to VS Code's workbench.html and puts its script file next to it. It asks before it changes anything, and nothing is changed if you say no.

Good to know:

• VS Code will say its installation "appears to be corrupt". That warning is about this change. You can dismiss it ("Don't show again"). VS Code may also show [Unsupported] in the title bar.
• To undo it, run Pixel Cat: Remove from VS Code and reload. Uninstalling the extension also restores the files.
• VS Code updates replace the patched files; Pixel Cat puts the cats back after an update and reloads the window once.
• It needs write access to VS Code's install folder. The default per-user install on Windows works. If VS Code is installed for all users (for example under Program Files), run it once as administrator. Read-only installs (such as some Linux packages) can't be patched.
• If your company manages VS Code, check with them first.

Commands

Settings

• pixelCat.scale: size of one cat pixel, in screen pixels (default 2).

Credits

All art and code are original, drawn from scratch.