Hiding Your Pet During Screen Sharing: How to Hide Codex Pet Overlays Fast

Why you need to hide codex pet overlays before you record

A pet placed so it sits in the corner of your eye all day ends up in every recording you make. Most people find out during playback, usually four minutes into a client demo they have already sent.

The good news: getting rid of it takes about two seconds once you know which lever to pull. That matters more than it sounds, because a hide that takes four menus doesn't become a habit.

What screen sharing tools actually capture

Here is the part people get wrong. A pet during screenshare behaves differently depending on what you hand over: pick one window and the pet usually falls outside the frame, pick a whole display and it rides along every time.

Recording is stricter than sharing. Anything your GPU paints onto that monitor lands in the file, whatever you thought the app was pointed at.

• Zoom or Meet sharing a full display: the pet comes along regardless of which app you selected
• Zoom or Meet sharing a single window: the pet mostly lands outside the cropped frame
• OBS, QuickTime and ScreenFlow: everything on the captured monitor, floating sprite included
• Virtual cameras and similar plug-ins: same rule as window capture, plus whatever your compositor layers on top
• Slide tools that mirror the whole desktop: the worst case, and the one everybody forgets exists

Four ways to pause codex pet motion

These are ordered by how much they cost you. Start at the top and stop as soon as one of them solves it.

• Share one window rather than the entire display. Nothing else changes and the pet leaves the frame
• Drag the pet onto a monitor you are not sharing. This alone justifies a second screen for many people: /blog/dual-monitor-pet-placement covers the placement math
• Move Codex to another virtual desktop (Win+Tab on Windows, another Space on macOS) and share from the clean one
• Quit Codex for the length of the call, then reopen it after

Hide pixel pet overlays for one app instead of quitting everything

Quitting Codex to sit through a fifteen-minute call costs more than it saves, especially with a long task still running in the background. Two options sit between doing nothing and killing the app.

On macOS, put Codex in its own Space and share a different one. On Windows, virtual desktops do the same job. Either way the pet keeps going where you left it. Which states stop cleanly and which restart from frame one is spelled out in /blog/codex-pet-9-animation-states.

Ninety seconds before the call

This is the whole check, and it catches nearly everything that goes wrong:

• Start the recording tool and read the preview thumbnail, not the meeting window
• Open the window you plan to share and look at all four corners
• Record five seconds, stop, and watch it back
• If you are sharing a whole display, hide the pet first
• Ask whoever else is on the call. They notice things you stopped seeing months ago

Bring it back when you are done

Nothing you did to hide the pet touched your files on disk. The sprite, the palette and the last position stay put, so reopening Codex drops the pet into the same corner. When it does not, the cause is usually a change in display arrangement rather than a broken install, and /blog/codex-pet-not-showing-fixes walks through that order.

Generate one at codexpetgenerator.com from any photo you have lying around, install it with the terminal steps at /blog/install-codex-pet-terminal, and check /pricing for how many generations your plan allows. The generator itself lives at /.