LAN Waifu

Everyone picks an anime character who lives on their screen: she roams your open code editors, reacts to what you're doing, and now and then visits teammates on the same network. She carries your messages and sounds, too: send one and she walks off your screen and onto your teammate's.

Created by Guy.

What she does

• Is yours. Pick one of seven characters with LAN Waifu: Choose Character (👗). Teammates may pick the same one; name tags show whose is whose when more than one is on a screen.
• Roams VS Code. On Windows she walks along the bottom of the whole window, just above the status bar, over editors, sidebar and terminal alike. Drag her anywhere in the window and she drops back down when you let go. On macOS and Linux she walks along the lines of your open editors instead. With roaming turned off she lives in the LAN Waifu panel in the Explorer.
• Can be thrown. Grab her and fling her: she flies with the mouse's speed and crash-lands (Windows). Fling her off the right or left edge and she flies onto that teammate's screen, crash-landing there; fling a visitor off and she flies home. With nobody in the room she bounces off the edge.
• Reacts to you. She cheers when you save, frets when errors appear (and cheers when you fix them), sits out of your way while you type fast, celebrates commits, and naps after two idle minutes.
• Visits teammates. Now and then she walks off an edge to visit someone: right to the next teammate, left to the previous one. Their characters visit you the same way, and head home after a while.
• Carries messages. LAN Waifu: Send Message (💌) picks a teammate and a message. Your character walks it over and tells them, plus a normal notification. If she's out visiting, she takes it once she's back.
• Comes when called. Ctrl+Alt+W (Cmd+Alt+W on Mac) brings her to your cursor, calling her home first if she's visiting.
• Brings sounds. LAN Waifu: Send a Sound (🔊) picks a teammate and a sound from the built-in pack (▶ previews it). Your character carries it over and asks "wanna listen?". Click her to play it. Unheard sounds wait in the panel and in the status bar (🔊 with a count) until you listen.
• Likes attention. Click any character, on your code or in the panel.

Without a room code she's yours alone and nothing touches the network.

Each person has one character. With several VS Code windows open, she lives in one of them (the first opened); if you close it, another window takes her over.

The LAN Waifu panel lists who's in the room, with their characters. Your name for teammates is your GitHub account's if you're signed in to VS Code with one, otherwise your computer's user name; LAN Waifu: Set Your Name (🏷 in the panel) changes it.

Use it

1. Run LAN Waifu: Set Room Code and agree on the same code with your teammates on the same network.
2. Teammates' characters start dropping by within a minute or so.

Settings

Privacy and security

• Every packet is encrypted (AES-256-GCM) with a key derived from the room code. People without the code can't read messages or forge packets. Pick a room code that isn't easy to guess.
• Each packet is unique, so recorded packets can't be replayed later. Teammates' clocks must agree within 10 minutes.
• Packets are size-checked and rate-limited on arrival.
• The relay, if you use one, only sees encrypted bytes and a room tag that doesn't reveal the code.

Troubleshooting

Run LAN Waifu: Show Diagnostics. It lists your IP addresses, the teammates this window sees, and how many packets were dropped and why.

• Nobody shows up: check everyone has the same room code. On Windows, allow VS Code on private networks when the firewall asks.
• "unreadable" packets climbing: someone nearby uses a different room code or an older version of LAN Waifu.
• "stale" packets: a teammate's clock is more than 10 minutes off.
• Office or guest Wi-Fi: these often block multicast. Add each other's IP addresses (shown in diagnostics) to lanWaifu.peers. If that doesn't work either, run the relay (relay/README.md) and set lanWaifu.relayUrl.

Develop

npm install
npm test          # room, mood and codec tests
npm run typecheck
npm run build     # also builds the Windows overlay app, if the .NET SDK is installed
npm run package   # builds lan-waifu-<version>.vsix

Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host, or from a terminal:

npm run build
code --new-window --disable-extensions --extensionDevelopmentPath="$PWD"

Don't open this folder inside the Extension Development Host and press F5 there. VS Code would restart that same window for debugging, nothing attaches, and it fails with "Extension host did not start in 10 seconds".

Layout:

• src/core/: the logic, all pure and tested. room.ts (peers, who has her, handoffs, letters, summons), mood.ts (reactions to your activity), codec.ts (encryption, replay and rate limits), protocol.ts (packets).
• src/net/: transports (lanTransport.ts, relayTransport.ts) and link.ts, which ties them to the codec.
• src/editor/: roaming over code editors and watching your activity.
• src/webview/: the panel she uses when no editor is open.
• overlay/: the Windows overlay app (C#, .NET Framework 4.8, which comes with Windows). It draws the characters in see-through windows on top of VS Code, moving them every screen refresh, and takes the mouse directly. src/overlay/overlayStage.ts starts it and talks to it over stdin and stdout, one JSON message per line. Building it needs the .NET SDK.
• src/art/characters.ts: the characters and their poses. The images in media/characters/ are made from the sheets in art/source/ by scripts/slice_characters.py (Python with Pillow, numpy and scipy; only needed when adding art). See "Adding a character" below.
• relay/: the optional relay server.

See RELEASE.md for publishing and TRIAL.md for testing with teammates.

Adding a character

1. Make two sheets in the same layout as the existing ones, 4 poses across and 2 down, on a transparent background:
   • <id>-1: idle, walk ×4, wave, jump, laptop
   • <id>-2: point, thumbs up, excited, asleep, thinking, cheering, peeking, laptop with a notification
2. Save them as art/source/<id>-1.png and art/source/<id>-2.png.
3. Run python scripts/slice_characters.py <id> and check art/preview/<id>.png.
4. Add the character to CHARACTERS in src/art/characters.ts and to the lanWaifu.character enum in package.json.

A full walk cycle can come from art/source/walk/<id>.png (or .webp): one row of frames of her walking, facing right, on a transparent background. Eight frames work well: contact, down, passing, up, then the same with the other foot. They replace the sheet-1 walk frames, scaled to match her other poses. The overlay advances them with the distance she walks, so if a new cycle has much longer or shorter steps, adjust CycleLength in overlay/Actor.cs.

A teammate whose character isn't installed on your machine is drawn as Midnight.

Known limits

• VS Code has no API for drawing over its window, hence the overlay app on Windows. On macOS and Linux roaming uses editor decorations with extra CSS (the trick Power Mode uses), which ties her to lines of text. It works in VS Code 1.141, but a future VS Code could stop allowing it; she'd then only appear in the panel.
• The overlay shows characters only while VS Code is the window in front, so they don't float over other apps.
• Without the overlay, a click on her lands in the text under her (moving your cursor there) and counts as clicking her when it's inside her outline. Past the end of a short line VS Code can't tell exactly where you clicked, so a click anywhere to the right of the text beside her counts.
• Sounds play through the OS (PowerShell on Windows, afplay on macOS, paplay or aplay on Linux), at your system volume.

Credits and license

Created by Guy. The code is MIT licensed. The character art is not: it's all rights reserved and may only be used as part of this extension. See LICENSE.

Sounds by Kenney (https://kenney.nl), CC0. See media/sounds/CREDITS.md.