DesktamerCodex pets: how to use them, and where to find more
In May 2026, OpenAI gave Codex a pet: a little animated companion that floats above your windows and shows how your chats are going. People loved them, and within weeks there were thousands more on fan galleries, drawn by Codex itself or by hand. The format is open, so a Codex pet isn’t stuck in Codex. It can walk along the bottom of your screen all day.
Everything here was checked on OpenAI’s docs, the galleries and the apps’ own pages on 30 September 2026.
What Codex pets are
Pets arrived in Codex on 1 May 2026, with eight to choose from: Codex, Dewey, Fireball, Rocky, Seedy, Stacky, BSOD and Null Signal. Since July, Codex has been part of the ChatGPT desktop app, and that’s where the pet lives now, on macOS and Windows.
The pet floats above your other windows and shows four states: Running, Needs input, Ready and Blocked. Its bell opens your threads, and you can start a new chat from it by typing or speaking. It’s a status light with a face, there to tell you when Codex needs you.
Turn one on in Codex
- Pick a pet: open Settings, then Pets (or your profile menu, then Pets), and choose one. The size is under Customize.
- Show or hide it: type
/pet, or right-click the pet and choose Hide. - Make your own: Settings, Pets, Create pet. Codex opens a chat with its hatch-pet skill. Describe your pet, wait while it draws, then go back to Settings, Pets, choose Refresh, and pick it.
- In the terminal: the Codex CLI shows pets too, with
/pets, if your terminal can draw pictures (iTerm2 3.6 or later, or one with Kitty graphics or Sixel).
What a pet is made of
A Codex pet is a folder with two files:
pet.json, which names it: anid, adisplayNameand adescription.- A spritesheet, usually
spritesheet.webp: every frame of every animation in one image, in a grid of 192×208-pixel cells, one animation per row.
There are two layouts:
| Size | Rows | What’s new | |
|---|---|---|---|
| v1 | 1536×1872 | 9 | The original: idle, walking both ways, waving, jumping, and the rows Codex plays for each state |
| v2 | 1536×2288 | 11 | Two more rows with sixteen directions, so the pet can look toward your pointer |
Every pet Codex hatches now is v2, and its pet.json says "spriteVersionNumber": 2. The ChatGPT desktop app plays both. The Codex CLI and ChatGPT on the web only take v1 so far.
To draw one yourself, see how to make your own desktop pet, which goes through every row. To see whether a pet you have is put together right, drop it in our free Codex pet checker: it plays every row and checks the pet the way Desktamer imports it.
Where to find more
| Gallery | Pets | Filter for v2 | How you get one | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| codex-pets.net | 3,369 | Yes | A zip, or npx codex-pets add <id> |
Free, no login. Uploaders confirm they have the rights |
| Petdex | 4,872 | Yes | A zip, or npx petdex install <slug> |
Pets belong to whoever made them, under the license they chose |
| CodexPets.net | 842 | No | A zip | Personal, non-commercial use only |
| codexpet.top | 258 | Labelled | A zip | CC BY-NC 4.0: no commercial use |
The counts are from each gallery’s own page. Many pets appear on more than one.
To add a gallery pet to Codex, make a folder for it in .codex/pets, in your home folder, and unzip it there, so you have .codex/pets/<pet-name>/pet.json. On Windows that’s C:\Users\<you>\.codex\pets. Then choose Refresh in Settings, Pets. The npx commands above do the unzipping for you, if you have Node.js.
Keep one on your desktop
Codex’s pet is there for Codex: it’s out while the ChatGPT app is open, and it’s busy telling you about your chats. If you’d rather have a pet that walks along your screen all day, naps, and doesn’t care what Codex is doing, you need an app that plays Codex pets on the desktop.
| App | Price | Systems | What your pet does there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktamer | $9.99 once | Mac, Windows, Linux | Walks the bottom of your screen (and a Mac’s menu bar), naps, eats, and stars in a small idle RPG |
| OpenPets | Free, open source | Mac, Windows, Linux | Roams your screens, with plugins for focus timers and reminders, and hooks for coding agents |
| Petdex Desktop | Free, open source | Mac, Windows, Linux | Floats on your screen and reacts to your coding agent |
| Petex | Free, open source | Mac, Windows | Runs from the menu bar or the tray, looks the way you drag it (v2 pets), and never goes online |
| Codex Pet for VS Code | Free to install | Wherever VS Code runs | Plays in a side panel of your editor |
On Linux, the ChatGPT app is in preview, and its floating pet is documented only for macOS and Windows, so a desktop app is the way to have your pet out.
Codex pets in Desktamer
We make Desktamer, and Codex pets are its pets. There are four ways to bring one home:
- The Gallery tab browses codex-pets.net inside the app. Sort by new or popular, filter by animals, creatures, people or objects, and bring one home in one click.
- Import from URL takes a codex-pets.net pet page, or a direct link to a zip or a spritesheet.
- Drop it on the Pets tab: a zip, a pet folder, or just the sheet.
- Already in Codex? Pets in
.codex/petsshow up in Desktamer by themselves, and play from where they are. Hatch a new one in Codex and it’s on your desktop too.
Then it lives with you. It walks the bottom of your screen, or the menu bar on a Mac. It waves when you hover over it, jumps when you click it, naps on its “Failed” row and eats on its “Running” one. A v2 pet turns to look at your pointer. It gets hungry and tired, slowly, and grows fond of you, up to five hearts. And it can join your party in Quest, a small idle RPG where your pets are the heroes.
You can try a pet on this site first: drop a Codex spritesheet in the box on the home page and it walks out onto the page.