Desktop pets for your Mac

Updated October 25, 2026

A desktop pet is a small character that lives on top of your windows. On a Mac you can have one that reacts to your typing (Teclo's keycap pet, Bongo Cat), one that causes trouble (Desktop Goose), classic Shimeji walkers, or one that watches your AI coding agents (AgentPet).

The pets, side by side

Teclo’s keycap pet

Teclo is a keyboard sound app, and its pet is a keycap with a face that sits on your desktop and follows how you type. It sleeps until your first key and falls asleep again after a minute without one. In between, its mood follows your smoothed typing speed:

The four power-ups at the bottom are earned by holding the pace: each needs its speed kept up for the time shown, starting from the level below. Steady typing at 72 WPM reaches Legend in about 47 seconds. Slow down and it steps back down after a short grace.

On top of the mood come short reactions: a burst when you press Return, a combo count for long runs without a pause, a cool-down when a power-up is lost, and a yawn. Each power-up and reaction can be unticked on the Pet page, and the eye next to each one previews it.

Making it yours

Click the pet to open its page. You can pick one of eight presets (Teclo, Sir Clack, Confetti, Majesty, Sprout, Mittens, Halo and Bolt), or Randomize, or set each part: keycap and accent colours, eyes, mouth, a hat (a beanie, cap, crown, party hat, top hat, bow, sprout or halo), cheeks, brows, outline, size and a name tag.

Since Teclo 1.0.8 the pet can also be a picture of your own: a photo of your cat, a logo, a drawing. Choose a PNG, JPEG or HEIC, or drop it on the Pet page. Teclo keeps its own copy, and the picture wears the pet’s moods and power-ups.

Drag the pet anywhere on screen. Clicking or dragging it makes no click sound, even with mouse sounds on.

Teclo’s pet page has a pet that follows your typing right in the browser.

What the others do differently

• Bongo Cat is a cat that, in the Steam description’s words, punches your taskbar with each key press. The Steam version adds points and hats; the open-source one is a separate project with over 24,000 stars on GitHub, the most of any pet here.
• Desktop Goose does not react to your work at all. It is a prank pet that drags your pointer away and fills your screen with notes, and it is the one to install on a friend’s Mac.
• Shimeji are small characters that walk and climb along your windows. The Mac ports are hobby projects; Shijima-Qt’s own README says it was “discontinued and archived” and points to other versions.
• AgentPet reacts to AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor rather than to your typing.

If you want the pet and keyboard sounds in one app, that is Teclo: play its packs, see how to make your Mac’s keyboard sound mechanical, or compare it with Kachunk, whose Chunk also reacts to typing. Like any app that reacts to typing, Teclo needs Input Monitoring; is a keyboard sound app safe? explains what that allows.