dogtty

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Shows an AI-generated shiba inu in the bottom-right corner of your Ghostty terminal, and swaps it for a new one every 3 minutes.

Built as a small ADHD aid: a bit of comfort and visual variety in the terminal you stare at all day.

How it works

launchd (every 180s)
  → dogtty
      1. Generate a shiba inu image with Pollinations.ai (free, no API key)
      2. Convert it to a 300px PNG and overwrite ~/.local/share/dogtty/dogtty.png
      3. Send SIGUSR2 to Ghostty to reload its config → the corner dog changes

6 poses × 6 styles (watercolor, pastel, flat illustration, colored pencil, DSLR photo, film photo) × random seed — a different shiba every time.

Files

The tool is the single dogtty script: generation plus the install / config / uninstall subcommands. It is fully self-contained (it even generates its own launchd plist), so downloading that one file is enough.

Setup

./dogtty install

It asks for the dog, the look and the interval (Enter keeps the shown value). In non-interactive contexts it installs silently with the defaults (shiba inu, mixed, 180s).

The dog picker offers shiba inu (default), shih tzu, corgi, toy poodle, golden retriever, or a free-form prompt (which doesn't even have to be a dog). The look picker offers mixed (default), illustration only, photo only, or a free-form style (e.g. pixel art). Choices are stored under ~/.config/dogtty/.

Then add the following to your Ghostty config (~/.config/ghostty/config) and reload with Cmd+Shift+,:

background-image = ~/.local/share/dogtty/dogtty.png
background-image-position = bottom-right
background-image-fit = none
background-image-opacity = 0.3

Usage

dogtty                                  # generate a random shiba now
dogtty "corgi puppy, pixel art"         # generate with your own prompt
dogtty config                           # change the dog, look and interval interactively
dogtty install                          # (re)install
dogtty uninstall                        # remove everything

(install, uninstall and config are reserved words and can't be used as generation prompts.)

Operations

• Change the dog, the look or the interval anytime with dogtty config — each question is prefilled with the current setting, so Enter skips what you don't want to change
• Logs go to ~/Library/Logs/dogtty.log (auto-truncated over 1MB)
• When Ghostty is not running, dogtty skips generation entirely (no wasted API calls)

Uninstall

dogtty uninstall

The 4 background-image lines added to your Ghostty config must be removed manually.

Notes

• Do not symlink ~/.local/bin/dogtty into this repository. If the repo lives under a TCC-protected folder such as ~/Documents, launchd cannot read through the symlink and fails with "Operation not permitted". A real copy is required — dogtty install does exactly that (re-run it after editing the script)
• Never send Ghostty any signal other than SIGUSR2. Unhandled signals kill the process. Config reload via SIGUSR2 is officially supported since Ghostty 1.2
• Anonymous Pollinations.ai usage is rate-limited: rapid requests get HTTP 429, so the script retries up to 3 times with a 15-second wait
• Generated images are AI output, free of copyright concerns

Requirements

• macOS (sips, launchd, and python3 are all stock macOS tools)
• Ghostty 1.2+ (background-image and SIGUSR2 reload required; tested on 1.3.1)

License

MIT