A desktop pet for your Mac that actually does something

Most desktop pets are decoration: charming on Monday, closed by Friday, because they never tell you anything you didn't already know. The ones that stick have a job. Here's the honest range of options on macOS — several of them free and none of them ours — ending with the one we build.

Option 1 — a pet that's just nice to look at (free)

If what you want is a bit of life on the desktop, take the free route and stop there. Two that are genuinely good at this:

RunCat Neo — a cat that runs in your menu bar, faster as your CPU gets busier. It's open source (Apache-2.0), free on the App Store, and accepts custom PNG runners and custom JSON metrics, so people have wired it to show things like Claude Code usage. It wants a recent macOS, so check the requirement before installing.
Cat Gatekeeper — a cat that interrupts you for breaks. Free, local timer, no account, no tracking. It's a lovely pomodoro with a cat on top; it has no idea what your agents are doing.

Honest framing: these are decoration and timers. A menu-bar CPU graph can't distinguish "my agent finished" from "Xcode is indexing," and a fixed-interval break timer will nudge you at the exact moment your agent is waiting for a decision.

Option 2 — if you use Codex or ChatGPT desktop, you already have one (free, built in)

OpenAI ships Pets as an official Codex feature: a floating desktop pet and activity tray in ChatGPT desktop, a /pet command, a built-in terminal pet in Codex CLI (iTerm2/Kitty/Sixel), and pet states for Running / Needs input / Ready / Blocked. You can upload your own sprite sheet. Codex also has its own separate notification settings for turn completion, permissions, and questions.

There's a real community ecosystem around that format — free galleries like codexpet.top and Petdex install pets straight into ~/.codex/pets/.

If Codex is the only agent you use, this is the answer. It's first-party, free, and already installed. The limit is the obvious one: it watches Codex. Your Claude Code run in another terminal and your Cursor window don't exist to it.

Option 3 — DIY: make a sound or a banner, no pet at all (free)

Sometimes the pet is not the point and you just want to know when a long run ends. Every major agent can run a shell command on its own lifecycle events. For Claude Code, this goes in ~/.claude/settings.json and plays one sound when the agent needs you, another when it stops:

{
  "hooks": {
    "Notification": [{ "hooks": [{ "type": "command",
      "command": "afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff" }] }],
    "Stop": [{ "hooks": [{ "type": "command",
      "command": "afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Funk.aiff" }] }]
  }
}

Merge it into your existing hooks object rather than replacing the file; follow the official hooks docs for the current shape. Honest limits: every Notification sounds the same, nothing tells you which project, and you rebuild it per agent — Cursor uses ~/.cursor/hooks.json, Codex uses ~/.codex/hooks.json, OpenCode uses a TypeScript plugin, Gemini CLI uses ~/.gemini/settings.json. Each one is a different format. We wrote that up per agent: Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini CLI.

If you want an actual animated pet across several agents and you're not on macOS, the open-source clawd-on-desk is the one to look at — a pixel pet that reflects agent state, covers multiple agents, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and can import Codex pet animation packs. It's free. We're macOS-only, so for Windows and Linux it beats us by default.

Option 4 — a pet that watches every agent, and is your own animal

Sleepwing (free beta, macOS 14+, Apple Silicon) is the version of this we wanted and couldn't find: one pet on the desktop that represents every connected agent, with a specific job beyond looking cute.

It knows which state it's in, per session. Working, waiting-for-you, finished, failed — through each provider's official local hooks: Claude Code, Cursor IDE and CLI, ChatGPT/Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, TRAE, and the pi coding agent. One pet, not seven. Installation is reversible and never touches hooks it doesn't own.
It gets you back in one click. "Open task" selects the exact terminal tab in Terminal.app or iTerm2, using only the session's controlling tty device name (for example ttys012) — never terminal contents, paths, or window titles.
It turns waiting into actual breaks. Agent work time counts toward small health nudges — water, stretch, look away — and the timer pauses the moment a session needs you, which is the bug in every fixed-interval break app.
It can be your cat. Pet Studio's "Start from a photo" lifts the subject out of a photo entirely on your Mac — background removed, centered on a transparent canvas — and saves it as reference art in Downloads/Sleepwing Reference Art. You then pick a style (faithful to photo, pixel, plush, sticker, or 3D toy) and hand it to your own coding agent with the bundled perch-pet skill, which produces a complete animated .perchpet package you import back. Two built-in characters ship with the app, three sizes, reduced-motion support; installed Codex-format pets under ~/.codex/pets are discovered automatically and appear in the same library.
It makes zero outbound network requests. No account, no telemetry. Hooks reduce events locally before they cross loopback: only the provider, an opaque session ID, the phase, a timestamp, a bounded task label, and an allowlisted local resume route. Grep the source — it's source-available under FSL-1.1-MIT. Measured on the release build: ≈0.8% CPU and ≈100 MB while the pet idles at 30 fps.

Honest limits, because they matter here: macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon only — no Intel build, no Windows, no Linux. Hook delivery is best-effort and never blocks your agent, so if the app isn't running you lose a notification rather than a turn. And the photo flow is honest about the division of labour: the subject lift and the import validation are native and local, but the animated sprite production is done by your agent, which needs image generation and visual inspection — whatever that agent sends to its own model is between you and it. Sleepwing itself sends nothing.

⬇ Download the notarized beta (macOS 14+, Apple Silicon)

Pick by situation: you want decoration or a CPU cat → RunCat Neo, free, stop here. Breaks but no agents → Cat Gatekeeper. Codex is your only agent → use OpenAI's built-in Pets, it's first-party and already there. Windows or Linux → clawd-on-desk. Just want a sound at the end of one agent's run → the DIY hook above, no app needed. Several agents a day on a Mac, you want waiting-for-you to look different from done, and you'd like the pet to be your own animal → that's what Sleepwing is for.

中文速览

大多数 Mac 桌宠是纯装饰，新鲜两天就关掉了——因为它们并不知道你的电脑在干什么。诚实的几种选择：只要可爱就用 RunCat Neo（菜单栏跑猫，开源 Apache-2.0，免费，支持自定义 PNG 角色与自定义 JSON 指标，注意它要求较新的 macOS）或 Cat Gatekeeper（猫咪休息提醒，本地计时、无账户、无追踪）；只用 Codex 的话官方自带 Pets 最合适——ChatGPT 桌面端的浮动桌宠与活动托盘、/pet 命令、Codex CLI 终端宠物，四种状态（Running / Needs input / Ready / Blocked），还能上传自定义精灵图，社区画廊（codexpet.top、Petdex）可一键装到 ~/.codex/pets/，但它只看 Codex；只想要个提示音就自己写 hook（上面有可复制的 ~/.claude/settings.json 配置，注意合并而非覆盖；各家格式不同：Cursor 用 ~/.cursor/hooks.json、OpenCode 用 TS 插件、Gemini CLI 用 ~/.gemini/settings.json）；不用 macOS 就看开源的 clawd-on-desk（Win/mac/Linux 全覆盖、免费、可导入 Codex 宠物动画包）。

Sleepwing 做的是另一件事：一只桌宠代表所有 Agent（Claude Code、Cursor、Codex、OpenCode、Gemini CLI、TRAE、pi），通过各家官方本地 hooks 区分「工作中／等你／完成／失败」，可逆安装、不碰你已有的 hooks；点一下跳回 Terminal.app / iTerm2 的确切标签页（仅依据 tty 设备名，不读终端内容与路径）；把 Agent 工作时间换成真实的小休息，并在 Agent 等你时自动暂停提醒。Pet Studio 的「从照片开始」在本机抠出主体（去背、居中、透明），存到 Downloads/Sleepwing Reference Art，选风格（忠于照片／像素／毛绒／贴纸／3D 玩具）后交给你自己的 Agent 用自带 perch-pet 技能产出完整动画包再导入——照片不离开本机；~/.codex/pets 下已装的 Codex 格式宠物会自动出现在同一个库里。零外联、无账户、无遥测，源码可审计（FSL-1.1-MIT）。如实说明短板：仅支持 macOS 14+ Apple Silicon（无 Intel／Windows／Linux 版本）；hook 为尽力而为投递，应用未运行时丢事件而不排队；动画产出依赖你的 Agent 具备出图与自检能力，Sleepwing 本身不联网。免费 Beta。