Corta brand assets#

The name "Corta", the pangolin mascot and the application icon are not covered by the Apache licence over the source code. See NOTICE at the repository root.

Files#

The two scripts that make these images live in scripts/brand/: compose-screenshot.swift adds the shadow, margin and poster type to a window capture, and social-preview.swift renders the social preview card.

The mascot animation#

The animated counterpart of corta-pangolin-mascot.png, for pages that can show motion; the project README keeps the still. The loop is intentionally subtle: the curled pangolin breathes and floats by a few pixels while the cyan cursor at the tip of its tail pulses. It is 360 x 360 pixels and designed to remain legible when displayed at 180–240 pixels wide.

The social preview card#

Rendered by a script rather than checked in from a design tool, so the wording can change without reopening an editor. Pure AppKit and Core Text — nothing to install. Run it from the repository root; the mascot is loaded by a relative path.

swift scripts/brand/social-preview.swift docs/brand/social-preview.png light
swift scripts/brand/social-preview.swift /tmp/dark.png dark

The card is uploaded by hand: repository Settings ▸ General ▸ Social preview.

Taking the screenshot#

Never point the app at the machine's real shell or configuration for this — a prompt carries a username and a hostname, and launchctl setenv SHELL would change the shell for every application the user launches afterwards (CLAUDE.md). Everything goes in the environment of the one launch you control. The images here, and the social posters made from the same captures, were taken like this, with nothing outside one scratch directory touched:

• The development build (CortaDev, D22), so the installed Corta and its configuration are never involved.
• CORTA_STAGE_DIR pointing at a scratch directory whose config sets appearance = light, font-size = 14, the window's columns and rows, and turns off restore-windows and suggest-applications-folder.
• ZDOTDIR pointing at a scratch .zshrc that sets a neutral prompt (%1~ ❯, green or red by exit status), sources the shell integration script, and feeds queued commands to the prompt from a zle-line-init widget, so every command on screen ran for real.
• Public content only — a local clone of this repository for git log, the mascot for kitten icat, a demo table for wide characters.
• screencapture -o -l <window id> for the window without its shadow, found by the process id; the shadow and the margin are added afterwards, so every image matches. A popover and an attached sheet are child windows and come with their window; the command palette is a window of its own, laid on with compose-screenshot.swift overlay.
• The SFTP browser connects through CORTA_SFTP_SSH to a stand-in ssh that runs /usr/libexec/sftp-server -d <scratch tree>, so the listing and the upload are real and no server is involved. Move the window to the right edge of the screen before opening the transfers popover: macOS keeps a popover on screen, not inside its window, and one that hangs past the window shows the desktop through its glass.
• A short stage path. Settings prints the config file's path in its footer; a symbolic link such as /tmp/corta-demo to the scratch stage keeps the scratch directory's name out of the picture. Remove it after.
• A mascot sized for the pane. kitten icat scales a larger picture to the pane's width; resizing it first keeps it the size the layout wants.
• Keys by code. Synthetic typing goes through the active input method — Pinyin turns [ into 【 — so shortcuts are sent as key codes (key code 33 using command down), and text goes in by pasting.

swiftc -O scripts/brand/compose-screenshot.swift -o /tmp/compose
/tmp/compose plain window.png docs/brand/screenshot.png
/tmp/compose overlay window.png palette.png 350 184 with-palette.png
/tmp/compose poster with-palette.png card.png "Every command, one search away" "⇧⌘P opens the command palette"