A Cute Cat that Lives on Your Screen

I Built a Tiny Desk Cat That Knows When I’m Coding 🐱

What I Built

I built Mewly, a tiny pixel-art desktop companion for a friend who spends way too much time coding.

Instead of another productivity dashboard or notification-heavy app, Mewly just lives on the desktop and reacts to what you're doing.

When you're actively coding, Mewly moves around your screen. When you stop for a while, it notices the inactivity and eventually goes to sleep. You can let it move automatically or take control yourself.

The idea was simple: make long coding sessions feel a little less lonely without adding another distracting app to the workflow.

📦 Download Mewly:

https://github.com/Adii0906/Mewly/releases/download/v1.0.0/Mewly.exe

Code

The entire project is open source:

🔗 GitHub:

https://github.com/Adii0906/Mewly

Feel free to explore the code, try Mewly yourself, or contribute.

How I Built It

Mewly is built as a lightweight Windows desktop application designed to quietly run in the background without getting in the way.

I designed its behavior around simple activity states:

Coding → Active → Idle → Sleeping

It includes:

• 🐱 Automatic movement by default
• 🖱️ Manual movement when you want control
• ⏱️ Inactivity detection
• 😴 Automatic sleeping after being idle
• 🖥️ Desktop interaction
• ⚡ Lightweight background execution

I wanted the implementation to stay lightweight instead of turning a tiny desktop companion into another resource-heavy application.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Mewly is open source because the fun part of a desktop companion is being able to change it.

Someone can modify the animations, add new behaviors, connect it to their own workflow, create new characters, or completely change what happens when they're away from their computer.

Because the source is open, people can experiment with the idea instead of treating the application as a finished product.