How-To Series · 6: Power User

Hermes · Pets (Petdex Mascots)

Animated mascots that react to agent activity across the CLI, TUI, and desktop app. Off by default, purely cosmetic.

After this videoYou can now: give Hermes an animated mascot that reacts to agent activity.

Hermes can show an animated pet, a small mascot sprite from the public petdex gallery that reacts to agent activity. Six states: idle, run, review, wave, jump, failed. Purely cosmetic, zero effect on tokens or behavior. Off by default. Quick start: hermes pets list to browse, hermes pets install <slug> --select to install and activate, hermes pets show to preview. Full command set: select, scale (0.1-3.0), doctor, off, remove. Inside a session: /pet slash commands (/pet, /pet list, /pet scale, /pet <slug>, /pet off). Desktop app: floating sprite, Cmd+K Pets palette, Settings > Appearance size slider, Shift-click to pop out into transparent always-on-top window. Rendering: full fidelity on kitty/Ghostty/WezTerm/iTerm2/sixel, auto-fallback to Unicode half-blocks. Config under display.pet in config.yaml.

About these resources. Every command in this video comes from the Pets (Petdex Mascots) doc.

New words here · Plain English

one sentence each · full glossary

MascotAn animated character that reacts to what the agent is doing. Cosmetic only, off by default.

PetdexThe collection of animated mascots available for Hermes.

Sources · What this video distills

1 docs page · every command below traces to one of them

Primary and only source: pets overview, commands, slash command, desktop app, rendering, config, troubleshooting

Pets (Petdex Mascots)

Commands shown · Copy and paste

each shows the source doc it came from

Browse galleryfrom source ↗

hermes pets list

Install and activatefrom source ↗

hermes pets install boba --select

Previewfrom source ↗

hermes pets show

Diagnose setupfrom source ↗

hermes pets doctor

Going deeper · Related Hermes docs

further reading · not sources of facts shown above

pets are profile-scoped, each profile keeps its own set

display.pet settings in config.yaml

Next in the series · Episodes that build on this

Configuration Deep Dive