Cat

An animated cat that lives in your bar. It sleeps when your CPU is idle, walks as load picks up, and breaks into a full sprint under heavy load — colored to match your theme, or any color you pick.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	dotnetrob/cat
Entries	Bar widget: cat; panel: panel

Usage

Add the "Cat" widget to any bar from Settings → Bar → Add Widget. Click the widget to toggle a popup panel showing the same cat at panel size — animating in step with the bar cat — plus the current CPU percentage; click anywhere outside the panel to dismiss it. The panel can also be toggled over IPC:

noctalia msg panel-toggle dotnetrob/cat:panel

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
cat_size	int	24	Sprite size in the bar, in pixels (12–48).
show_cpu_percent	bool	false	Display the CPU percentage next to the cat.
walk_threshold	int	15	CPU percentage at which the cat wakes up and starts walking.
run_threshold	int	60	CPU percentage at which the cat breaks into a run.
poll_interval	int	2	How often to read CPU usage, in seconds (1–10). Noctalia's system monitor sets the fastest refresh, 2 seconds by default.
cat_color_mode	select	theme	theme colors the cat with the palette's secondary role and tracks theme changes; custom uses the color below.
cat_color	color	#E8A24C	Used when cat_color_mode is custom.

Notes

Every poll_interval seconds the widget reads CPU usage from Noctalia's system monitor (noctalia.systemStats(), plugin API 12) — apart from loading its bundled font no files are read or written, nothing is downloaded, and no processes are spawned. Noctalia refreshes that reading on its own schedule (cpu_poll_seconds under [system.monitor], 2 seconds by default), and with the system monitor disabled the cat stays asleep at 0%. The panel does no sampling of its own: it mirrors the bar widget through the plugin's in-process shared state store, so without a cat widget in any bar it shows a sleeping cat with no CPU reading. The cat's shape comes from a small custom icon font (fonts/catwalk2.otf) traced from the MIT-licensed CatWalk plasmoid by Driglu4it, which lets it be recolored like normal bar text instead of a fixed-color image.