🐱 purrminal

A healing-style CLI tamagotchi that grows in your terminal. No death — just care.

purrminal = purr (a happy cat) + terminal. Hatch an egg, care for it while you work, and watch it branch-evolve into one of several characters based on how you looked after it.

Install / Run

npx purrminal          # try it instantly
npm i -g purrminal     # or install globally, then run `purrminal` / `purr`

On first run you'll pick a language, a theme pack, and a playstyle.

Playstyles

• 😌 Chill — stays happy on its own, a calm desk buddy (no decay)
• 🌱 Tend — needs care over time, classic tamagotchi (decays while away)

Care actions are always available in both. Focus (t) runs a 25-minute pomodoro session — an optional bonus that grows your pet faster than a single tap (it never gates basic care).

Render styles

Press c in the live view to cycle the pet's look: line-art (ASCII), LCD (Game Boy palette), and pixel (full color). On truecolor terminals it defaults to the LCD tamagotchi look; elsewhere it falls back to line-art.

Keys (in the live view)

f feed · p play · s sleep · t focus · c style · q quit

Growth & evolution

🥚 egg → kitten → junior → adult. At adulthood your pet branches based on how it was cared for — disciplined, high-energy, neglected, or balanced. It never dies: neglect just makes it sad/scruffy, and good care brings it back.

Themes & languages

Theme packs: dev / general / cat. Languages: English / 한국어 / Español. Both are plain JSON in src/themes and src/locales — the evolution tree lives in each theme pack, so new packs and translations are data-only. PRs welcome!

Terminal greeting

purrminal setup-greeting   # adds a one-line pet greeting to your shell rc (.zshrc/.bashrc)

Then every new terminal greets you with your pet's status.

Development

npm install
npm test        # vitest
npm run build   # tsc -> dist/

State lives in ~/.purrminal/state.json. No server, no daemon: elapsed time is applied lazily when you open the app.

License

MIT