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Eikon is Herm’s avatar system: an animated character rendered directly in the chat sidebar that gives your Hermes agent a visual persona. Each eikon is a self-contained .eikon file — a text-based NDJSON format — stored under ~/.hermes/eikons/<name>/ alongside an optional source/ folder containing the original image or video the avatar was rendered from. Herm ships with bundled eikons so you have something to start with, and the broader ecosystem lets you browse, install, and share community-created avatars without leaving the terminal.

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How eikons work

When Herm renders your chat sidebar, it reads the currently active eikon — identified by name in your preferences — and plays it as an animated text-art avatar. The animation is produced by a rasterizer that converts a source image or video into character-art frames. Two rasterizers are available:

chafa

The default rasterizer. Produces rich, colourful output using the chafa command-line tool. Requires chafa to be on your PATH.

native

A built-in fallback rasterizer with no external dependencies. Always available, even without chafa installed.
Herm automatically selects the best available rasterizer. You can change it at any time from inside Eikon Studio.

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The Eikon tab

Press Alt+5 to open the Eikon tab. It contains three sub-tabs, each reachable by keyboard or slash command:

Gallery

Browse every installed eikon, activate one for the sidebar, install from a local file, or submit your own to the Marketplace.

Studio

A full-featured editor for creating and tuning eikons — image source, knob controls, a live preview pane, and a per-state strip.

Marketplace

Browse and install community-shared eikons from the public catalog. Accessible from Gallery via M, or directly with /marketplace.

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Slash commands

You can jump directly to any Eikon sub-tab from the chat input without touching the mouse or cycling through tabs:
CommandDestination
/galleryEikon → Gallery
/studioEikon → Studio
/marketplaceEikon → Marketplace

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File layout

Every user-created or installed eikon lives in its own folder under your Hermes home: 
~/.hermes/eikons/
└── <name>/
    ├── <name>.eikon   # packed NDJSON — the shippable avatar file
    ├── studio.json    # your local editor settings (rasterizer, knobs, sources)
    └── source/        # base.<ext>, <state>.<ext> — your original media
The .eikon file is self-contained and portable. The source/ folder and studio.json are local-only — they hold your editable workspace and are not required by other installs.
Bundled eikons ship directly with Herm and do not have a source/ folder or a studio.json. You can edit a bundled eikon by creating a local copy in Studio.

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Discovery on the web

eikon.liftaris.dev is a browser-based mirror and discovery site for the public catalog. Use it to browse and preview entries from a browser, then install natively through Herm. All install, activate, and management actions happen inside Herm — the website is a read-only mirror.