haru

A tiny terminal cat companion. Type haru when the terminal feels too empty — it says meow, shows a little ASCII cat, and gives you a small, kind tip.

$ haru
meow.

 /\_/\
( o.o )
 > ^ <

tip: drink water before debugging. the bug can wait, your kidneys cannot.

Usage

haru            summon the cat
haru --pat      pat Haru (counts toward today's pats)
haru --feed     feed Haru (counts toward today's feeds)
haru --status   show mood and today's / total pats & feeds
haru --lang zh  force a language (auto-detected from your locale otherwise)
haru --version
haru --help

Haru remembers how many times you've patted and fed it today. It never guilt-trips you, never decays, and never punishes you for being away.

Languages

Haru speaks English, 中文, and 日本語. It picks your language from the system locale automatically; override with --lang en / --lang zh / --lang ja, or the HARU_LANG environment variable. Each language lives in assets/lang/<code>/ and is written by hand (not machine-translated) — contributions welcome.

Fully offline

haru does not touch the network and collects no data. Everything lives on your machine:

• State (the save file): $XDG_STATE_HOME/haru/state.json (Linux, default ~/.local/state/haru/); on macOS it falls back to ~/Library/Application Support/cat.haru.haru/state.json. It's plain JSON — read it, edit it, delete it to start fresh.
• Tips & flavor text: baked into the binary from assets/lang/<code>/ (tips.txt, plus pat.txt / feed.txt for pat & feed reactions). Edit and rebuild to make Haru say your own things.

Build

cargo build --release
./target/release/haru

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Parts of this project’s code were generated with the assistance of AI, but the author has a fairly complete understanding of the codebase and overall program architecture.

Contributions are welcome, whether in the form of code or copywriting in different languages. Your improvements are greatly appreciated.