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animfetch

Animated system fetch for Linux and macOS that pins live ASCII art above your terminal prompt while your shell keeps running underneath.

Alternative to: Giphy and Tenor
System Fetch Open Source CLI Tool Rust Terminal Customizable Linux & macOS
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About animfetch

animfetch is an animated system fetch tool that keeps its art pinned at the top of the terminal while a normal prompt and command output scroll below it. Running with the --pin flag sets a scroll region so the top rows never scroll, then detaches and continuously paints an animation there while the user's own shell runs underneath with its history, completion, and aliases fully intact. It ships with a wide selection of built-in animations — including a running cat, fox, dolphin, rabbit, deer, horse, and squirrel, along with abstract animations like a black hole, icosahedron, yin-yang, and rotating planets — selectable per run or set as a persistent default. Several rendering styles are available: half and quad render the art as solid rescaling blocks, ramp maps pixel coverage onto characters, and raw prints the art's native characters untouched for hand-drawn ASCII pieces. animfetch supports theme-following colors by reading a matugen, pywal, or wallust palette, re-reading it live under --pin so retheming recolors the running animation in place. It's written in Rust, distributed as a prebuilt binary for Linux and macOS (macOS support is newer) or installable from the AUR on Arch Linux, and includes an interactive mode where animfetch itself owns the prompt. Some animations are redrawn as ASCII from the RunCat project by kyome22, used under the Apache License 2.0.

Key Features

  • Pinned animated ASCII art above a live, fully functional shell
  • 20+ built-in animations (animals, planets, abstract art)
  • Multiple rendering styles: half, quad, ramp, and raw
  • Theme-aware coloring via matugen, pywal, or wallust palettes
  • Live re-theming while pinned recolors the running animation
  • Configurable width, height, FPS, and intro duration
  • Interactive mode where animfetch owns the prompt
  • No dependencies, single prebuilt binary
  • Available via install script, Cargo, or the Arch AUR
  • Automatically drops to a static frame when piped or NO_COLOR is set

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