Pets

Friends that live in your terminal

Up to three little pixel pets keep you company in the macOS terminal. Type a name and your pet answers – it thinks with Apple Intelligence, right on your Mac. It greets you, helps you find the right command and gets hungry now and then.

How pets work

Call them by name

mochi

Just the name starts a little chat. With words after it, the pet answers once: mochi how was your day?

They really talk

Pets think with Apple Intelligence on your Mac (macOS 26 and later, Apple silicon). In /ai your pet sits in the welcome box and is the spinner while the AI thinks – it blinks and wags its tail. Each one has its own personality, remembers the last few things you said and answers in your language. Without Apple Intelligence they still say hi – in short phrases.

Ask for help

/help

Your pet asks where you need help, finds the right commands and shows them. Press 1, 2 or 3 and the command is ready on your command line. /help all lists every command.

Pets know Lotus – what is new too, like the plugin installer, plugin packs and the web chat – and the commands of the plugins you installed.

Feed them

/feed mochi

After half a day without food a pet gets hungry and tells you on the start screen. It never gets ill – it is just happier after a snack.

Greetings and tips

One of your pets says hi below the start screen, a different one every day – with a tip about a Lotus command now and then. At night it sleeps.

They notice things

A typo in a command makes your pet tilt its head; when Remove BG or a download is done, it cheers. Turn this off in the settings if you prefer quiet.

Play for their food

/zetamac is a math game like the Arithmetic Game on Zetamac: 120 seconds, as many problems as you can. Normal has Zetamac's ranges – additions and subtractions with numbers up to 100, multiplications and divisions up to 12 × 100 – and an answer counts as soon as it is right, without Enter. Every right answer is a bite for each of your pets: the more you get right, the longer they stay full, up to two days. Your pets watch while you play and eat along.

$ /zetamac

Another time or level: /zetamac 60, /zetamac 300 hard, /zetamac easy – any time from 10 to 600 seconds. ← and → move between the digits of your answer: type the last digit first, then the ones before it. Your best score for each level and time is kept. In /pets the game is one entry below your pets.

Adopt, rename, say goodbye

/pets shows your pets side by side. Adopt up to three (a cat, a dog or your own kind), talk to them, feed them, give them a new name or their own personality – a few words like grumpy in the morning, loves rainy days change how they talk. The first-time setup offers a pet too.

CommandWhat it does
/petsYour pets: adopt, talk, feed, rename, personality, say goodbye, settings
<name> [message]Talk to a pet – the name alone starts a chat (⏎ on an empty line ends it)
/feed <name>Feed a pet
/zetamac [seconds] [easy|hard]The math game – every right answer feeds your pets
/help · /help allYour pet helps you find a command · every command
lotus pets add [file]Add your own kind of pet – from the clipboard, or from a file
lotus features pets offTurn pets off completely (also in /settings → Features)

Settings live in /pets → Settings and in /settings → Pets: the pet on the start screen, whether /help asks your pet, the reactions to typos and finished work, and what pets think with – Apple Intelligence, the AI you use for /ai, or nothing at all.

Make your own pet

A fox, an axolotl, a tiny dragon – any AI chat can draw a pet for Lotus. Copy the prompt, fill in the three brackets in the first lines, and paste it into the AI you like.

  1. Copy the prompt

    Fill in [animal], [name] and [personality] – or leave them for the AI to choose.

  2. Ask an AI

    Paste it into Claude, ChatGPT or any other chat. The answer is a small text file: a few details and the drawings.

  3. Copy the answer

    Copy the whole answer, then run lotus pets add. Lotus reads it from the clipboard, checks it, shows it and saves it.

  4. Adopt it

    Lotus offers to adopt it right away – or later in /pets.

Create a pet for Lotus, a start screen for the macOS terminal.

My pet is a [animal, e.g. fox] called [name]. Its personality: [a few words, e.g. clever, a little cheeky, loves autumn leaves].

Reply with only the file below in one code block, nothing else. Rules:
- Draw it like a tiny pixel sprite with the block characters ▀ ▄ █ ▌ ▐ ▖ ▗ ▘ ▝ ▙ ▚ ▛ ▜ ▞ ▟ (each one is two by two pixels; eyes are small gaps), or with plain ASCII. Nothing else: no emoji, no accents, no other Unicode.
- Every drawing is at most 8 lines high and 24 characters wide – about 10 wide and 4 high looks best.
- All drawings show the same animal at the same size and position, so they can be swapped like frames of an animation. Only the eyes, mouth, tail or ears change.
- species is one lowercase word with letters only.

species: [the animal in lowercase, e.g. fox]
label: [the animal, e.g. Fox]
about: [3 to 6 words about it]
sound: [the sound it makes, e.g. yip]
food: [its favorite food, one word]
snack: [that food as tiny ASCII art, at most 5 characters]
face: [its face in one line, at most 9 characters, e.g. (o.o)]
face_happy: [the same face, happy]
names: [the name], [three more name ideas]
personality: [its personality in one sentence]
[idle]
(the animal, looking at you)
[blink]
(the same drawing with closed eyes)
[wag]
(the same drawing with the tail or ears moved)
[talk]
(the same drawing with an open mouth)
[happy]
(the same drawing with happy eyes)
[eat]
(the same drawing, chewing)
[sleep]
(the same drawing, asleep, with a small z and Z next to it)

The pet file

Every pet is a plain text file – Lotus' own cat and dog too (data/pets/cat.pet), little pixel sprites drawn with block characters, two by two pixels each. Lines with key: value describe it, [idle], [blink], [wag], [talk], [happy], [eat] and [sleep] start the drawings; only [idle] is required. Your own pets are kept in ~/.config/lotus/pets/.

A pet file is only data: Lotus reads it, it never runs anything in it. Drawings keep plain ASCII and block characters and lose everything else, so a pet cannot change your terminal. What your pets say and remember stays on your Mac – Apple Intelligence runs on the device, and Lotus sends nothing anywhere.