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Pick it in ChatGPT & Codex¶

It looks like the files are installed but nothing is waving at you yet. Pets have to be selected once per surface.

Pets are a feature of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex products; Clippy Pet is a third-party pet that follows their published contract. Where you pick it depends on where you work.

The ChatGPT desktop app (macOS, Windows, and the Linux preview) hosts Codex and reads custom pets from ~/.codex/pets/.

  1. Install Clippy Pet (one-liner or a native installer).
  2. Open Settings → Pets.
  3. Choose Clippy Pet.
  4. If it isn't listed, quit and reopen the app (it scans the pets directory on launch).

Custom pets are per-user: each account on the machine runs the installer once, which is why the macOS .pkg seeds the console user's home and the Linux packages ask you to run clippy-pet install after installing.

  1. Install Clippy Pet.

  2. In the Codex CLI, type /pets and pick clippy-pet, or set it in ~/.codex/config.toml:

    [tui]
pet = "clippy-pet"

  3. Use a terminal that can draw images: iTerm2 3.6+, Kitty, or anything with Sixel support (WezTerm, foot, mlterm, recent xterm). Terminals without image support skip the pet rather than breaking.

Web pets are uploaded rather than installed, and the uploader currently accepts the older v1 sheet layout (1536×1872, nine rows, ≤ 20 MiB), not the v2 sheet the desktop app uses.

  1. Download spritesheet-v1.webp from the latest release (or build it: python3 scripts/build-v1-spritesheet.py).
  2. Open ChatGPT → Settings → Personalization → Pet and upload it.

The v1 build is a lossless crop of the v2 atlas: the same nine animation rows minus the two look-direction rows, so the web pet has every animation but doesn't track your pointer. Details in the pet contract.

Product names move fast

Surfaces and menu paths above reflect OpenAI's products as of August 2026 (the ChatGPT desktop app with Codex inside, the Codex CLI, ChatGPT on the web). If a menu has moved, open an issue and we'll update this page; the pet files themselves don't change.

What you should see¶

Idle breathing while you type; a wave when it appears; running animations when Codex is working; failed when a run errors; waiting while it's blocked on you; review while it reads a diff. Eyes track the pointer through sixteen directions on the desktop app. The animation gallery shows each state.

Troubleshooting