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Cat
v1.2.0 DotNetRob

About

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 sample CPU usage, in seconds.
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 /proc/stat to compute CPU usage — no other files are read or written, nothing is downloaded, and no processes are spawned. 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.

Versions

VersionPlugin APIUpdated
v1.2.0 latest3Jul 25, 2026

Older versions stay installable on a Noctalia release whose plugin API is below the latest version's.