Pixel Pet
A tiny pixel pet that lives on your Windows desktop and keeps you on task.
Free and open source. One 1.8 MB exe, no installer, no account, no telemetry.
Download for Windows · Website · Demo video
What it does
- Smart tasks. Type like you talk:
call mom tomorrow 5pm, stretch in 45m, standup weekdays 9:30, team sync every monday 10am.
- Focus timer. Pomodoro presets, a daily goal, streaks and a weekly recap.
- Network speed. Live download and upload speed in a bubble beside the pet.
- AI token counter. Today's and the last 7 days' tokens from Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, read from the logs already on your PC.
- A pet with moods. It stretches in the morning, naps when idle, sleeps at night and likes being stroked.
- Gets out of the way. Hides behind fullscreen games and video, never steals focus.
- Five pets, five themes. Cat, Dog, Mochi, Agent, Super Car; Night, Ocean, Forest, Candy, Mono.
Footprint
Measured on Windows 11 (Core i9-13900H), pet idle with the info bubble on, sampled for a minute:
| |
|---|
| Download | 1.8 MB, a single exe |
| Memory | about 17.6 MB working set (4 MB private) |
| CPU | about 0.02% |
Install
- Download the zip from Releases and unzip it anywhere.
- Run
pixel-pet.exe. The pet appears in the bottom-right corner and introduces itself.
The app is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run: choose More info, then Run anyway.
To uninstall, close the pet, delete the exe and the files starting with pixel-pet in %APPDATA%.
Hotkeys
| Keys | Action |
|---|
Ctrl+Alt+T | add a task |
Ctrl+Alt+F | toggle focus mode |
Ctrl+Alt+S | open the stats window |
Privacy
Everything stays on your PC. There is no account and no telemetry, and the app makes no network
connections: the speed bubble only reads Windows' own traffic counters. Settings and data live in
%APPDATA%.
Build from source
Needs Rust on Windows.
cargo test
cargo build --release
scripts\package.ps1 runs the tests, builds the release exe and zips it into dist\.
The code is plain Win32 and GDI with two dependencies (windows-sys, ruzstd). Start at src/main.rs;
pets are small pixel grids in src/art.rs, so a new pet is a good first contribution.
Licence
Code: GPL-3.0-or-later. Pixel art: CC BY 4.0. Third-party notices: NOTICE.md.
