Your CPU’s new emotional support animal. Forget blinking graphs and sterile charts. RustCat is here to make your system monitoring adorable.
RustCat is a lightweight, cross-platform taskbar companion that turns your CPU activity into a running cat animation. The faster the cat, the busier your CPU — no extra runtimes, no bloated dependencies, just pixel-perfect feline feedback.
Inspired by Kyome22/RunCat_for_windows, thanks for the cute cat.
Speedy Cat Visuals: Watch your system load as a tiny cat dashes across your taskbar.
No Runtime Baggage: Written in Rust, so it’s leaner than a whisker. (In human language: It's small and uses less memory.)
Platform Flair: Supports Windows, macOS, and Linux/KDE with native theme detection.
Auto Theme Matching: Your cat’s colors shift with your system's light/dark mode — drama-free style.
Visit the Releases page and grab the file. Double-click, and let the cat out.
On Linux the tray icon uses the freedesktop StatusNotifierItem (SNI) protocol over D-Bus, so it integrates natively with KDE Plasma's system tray.
# from source (needs a Rust toolchain)
cargo build --release
# the binary is at target/release/rust_catA flake.nix is provided:
# run directly
nix run github:bearice/RustCat
# build into a profile / your config
nix build .#default
# -> result/bin/rust_cat, plus result/share/applications/rustcat.desktop
# dev shell
nix developRuntime helper tools (kdialog, plasma-systemmonitor) are wrapped onto PATH automatically; the app degrades gracefully if a tool is missing.
Build note for packagers: the repo's
.cargo/config.tomlonly enablescrt-staticon Windows. On Linux the build links dynamically against glibc, which is what most distros (and Nix) expect.
“RustCat doesn’t monitor your CPU. It vibes with it.” — Bearice