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Eikons are animated terminal avatars for the Herm chat sidebar. They give a Hermes Agent session a visual persona without changing the agent runtime. Herm owns the native Eikon UI: Gallery, Studio, and Marketplace. The Eikon project owns the .eikon runtime format, package and catalog contracts, registry tools, shared CLI/library behavior, and the browser discovery gallery.

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Runtime format

A .eikon artifact contains line-delimited typed runtime records: a header, clip records, and frame records. Stored bytes may be plain UTF-8 NDJSON or gzip-compressed NDJSON. Herm decodes the artifact before playback. Herm works with six standard avatar states:

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Rasterizers

Herm Studio renders source media into terminal frames through rasterizers.

chafa

Uses the chafa command-line tool for color terminal art. Install chafa and keep it on PATH to use this renderer.

native

Uses Herm’s built-in renderer. It does not require chafa, but it still needs ffmpeg for media decoding.
Plugins can register additional rasterizers through the Herm plugin API.

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The Eikon tab

Open the Eikon tab with Alt+5 or jump to a sub-tab with a slash command.

Gallery

Browse installed and bundled eikons, activate one, create one, install from a source, update, delete, or submit a local draft.

Studio

Attach source media, tune rasterizer controls, render states, save drafts, and activate saved eikons.

Marketplace

Browse the public catalog, inspect package status, install entries, download source when available, and activate installed entries.

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Local file layout

User-created or installed eikons live under the active Hermes home:
The .eikon file is the portable runtime artifact. manifest.json records package/catalog identity when present. studio.json and source/ are local authoring data. Bundled eikons ship with Herm and may not have local source data until you create a draft.

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Browser discovery

The browser gallery at eikon.liftaris.dev is for discovery and preview. It gives install commands and catalog context. Install, activation, update, and removal happen in Herm or the Eikon CLI.

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Related docs