Kanna

A kanna (鉋) is a Japanese hand plane. You run it over rough wood and the roughness leaves in one curl.

Kunai is the blade. Kanna is who holds it.

She is deliberately brief

Kanna works nights. She is not a viewing companion and she will not watch with you.

That restraint is the point, not a limitation. Kunai's whole promise is getting out of your way, and a mascot that chatters in your terminal contradicts the product it belongs to. So she is never excited — her range runs from calm, to focused, to mildly put-out. A full session from launch to quit shows at most four lines from her.

If she ever feels like she is talking too much, that is a bug. Open an issue.

Where she shows up

She appears on the surfaces that would otherwise leave you looking at nothing — an empty list, a failed resolve, the setup wizard from Getting Started, and the goodbye screen. She stays quiet while something is loading or when a step already succeeded, because those already tell you what is happening.

·  No results for "dune 2099"
   Try a different spelling, or switch catalog.
   🦊 empty for now.

×  Could not resolve a stream
   3 providers tried · allanime, miruro, vidlink
   🦊 couldn't get there.

Poses

Each pose maps to something real that is happening, so she never becomes decoration.

All six ship, drawn from one locked character. Two more — seek and peek — are drawn but held back for a redraw, so a resolve currently borrows go.

Two tiers, and neither is required

Kanna has a picture tier and a text tier, and the text tier is the one that matters. The illustrated fox needs a terminal that can host a graphics protocol — Kitty, Ghostty, iTerm2, or WezTerm. Which terminals qualify on your system is covered in Platforms. Everywhere else she is a 🦊 and a line of text, which is the same character doing the same job.

Half-block rendering is deliberately skipped. This art turns to noise at two pixels per cell, and a smear is worse than a glyph.

Turning her off

Three states, and the way out is a real way out.

KUNAI_PET=off kunai

KUNAI_PET=off silences the text too, not just the artwork. Redirected output — a pipe, a redirect, a captured log — never gets either, so nothing decorative can end up in a file or break a parser.

KUNAI_POSTER=0 turns off images without retiring her, since the glyph is not an image. Both variables sit alongside the rest of the environment overrides in Customization.

Reduced motion

Every animation on this site and in the terminal is gated on your system's reduced-motion preference. With it on, the illustrated stills hold still — she does not breathe, lean, or react.

The roaming fox is the exception: she is not frozen, she is not rendered at all. Something that follows your pointer has no still version worth showing, so KunaiFoxRoamer returns nothing under reduced motion and the stylesheet hides her as a second guard. Every other surface keeps its artwork; only the movement stops.

Credits

Kanna is drawn as a rose kitsune in the Ember Dusk palette: #ff8fb0 fur, #ffc6d8 cream, on #1c1620. The blade mark stays on favicons and badges — she is the character, not the logo.