RunCat for GNOME Shell

RunCat provides a key-frame animation to the GNOME Shell top bar.
Animation speed changes depending on CPU usage.

Philosophy

RunCat is intentionally minimalistic — a running cat in the top bar and a CPU percentage next to it, nothing more. The extension is not meant to be a system monitor, and it will never grow dozens of settings, graphs, sensors, or extra indicators — there are plenty of other extensions for that. And if you already use a full-featured monitoring tool, that's great: the cat will happily run alongside it in your top bar.

Before opening a pull request, please read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Installation

This is the recommended method for installation, as it doesn't require the build dependencies for installation. You can install this extension by visiting the GNOME Shell Extensions page for this extension.

Manual installation

From source code

If you want to install the extension from sources, clone the RunCat repository, navigate to the cloned directory and run, you need npm installed:

$ npm i # one time only
$ make install

Release ZIP-archive

If you want to install the extension from release zip-archive, download runcat@kolesnikov.se.shell-extension.zip from the releases section and run:

$ gnome-extensions install path/to/runcat@kolesnikov.se.shell-extension.zip --force

After installation:

1. Restart the GNOME Shell: Log Out, then Log In;
2. Enable the extension:
   • Open GNOME Extensions → RunCat → On;
   • or Run in terminal: gnome-extensions enable runcat@kolesnikov.se.

Manage RunCat preferences

• Right-click on the extension button on the top bar → Settings;
• or Open GNOME Extensions → RunCat → ⚙️;
• or Open RunCat on GNOME Extensions portal → ⚙️;
• or Manage directly in dconf: dconf list /org/gnome/shell/extensions/runcat/.

Translations

Working with existing translations

make translations command extracts translatable strings and updates existing translations. Make sure that you've run this command before pushing changes.

• make po/messages.pot command extracts translatable strings;
• make po/*.po command updates existing translations.

Starting new translation

To create a new translation file, use the following command:
msginit -i po/messages.pot -l <locale> --no-translator -o po/<locale>.po.

Please be prepared to maintain your translation in future versions of the extension (see CONTRIBUTING.md).

Examples

Spanish locale: msginit -i po/messages.pot -l es --no-translator -o po/es.po.
Spanish (Argentina) locale: msginit -i po/messages.pot -l es_AR --no-translator -o po/es_AR.po.

Useful commands for developers

You need to install project JS dependencies first: npm i

• npm run test — run all available tests;
• npm run test:typecheck — check types;
• npm run test:lint — lint project files;
• make spawn-gnome-shell — spawn a nested GNOME Shell session to test the extension interactively (GNOME 49+); requires the mutter-devkit system package to be installed.

macOS version

Thanks to Takuto Nakamura for the macOS version and cat images.

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Developed by Sergei Kolesnikov