vim-xeyes

A tiny xeyes clone for Vim. Two eyes live in a popup window and follow your cursor around the screen, rendered as a real RGBA image, not text art.

2026-05-02.201751_muted.mp4

Requirements

Vim built with the popup image attribute (patch 9.2.0612 or later) and one of the supported image backends:

• sixel (+image_sixel) on a sixel-capable terminal
• kitty graphics (+image_kitty) on kitty, ghostty, WezTerm, Konsole, ...
• GDI (+image_gdi) on the MS-Windows GUI
• Cairo (+image_cairo) on the GTK GUI

Usage

:XeyesStart    " show the eyes
:XeyesStop     " hide them
:XeyesToggle   " toggle

The pupils chase the cursor and keep tracking correctly even when you move between split windows, because the gaze is computed from absolute screen coordinates (screenrow() / screencol()).

The eyes are shown automatically on startup by default. To disable that and start them manually with :XeyesStart, set this before the plugin loads:

let g:xeyes_autostart = 0

Installation

With vim-plug:

Plug 'mattn/vim-xeyes'

Or just drop the files into your ~/.vim (or runtimepath).

License

MIT

Author

Yasuhiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. mattn)