Chrome extension · Free
Put on a video for your cat and every pounce lands on the keyboard: paused, skipped, muted, tab closed. Cat Mode swallows every key, click, tap and scroll before the page ever sees it. You unlock it with a shortcut only a human would press.
No account No tracking, no servers Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave
What it does
Keyboard, mouse, trackpad, scroll, right-click and touch, all stopped in the capture phase, before the page or the video player sees them.
If anything else pauses a video or audio while Cat Mode is on, whether a stray media key or a rogue gesture, it starts it again.
Your own unlock combo, plus a browser-wide panic shortcut that works even while the page is locked. The toolbar toggle never stops working.
Cat Mode switches itself off after 5 minutes to an hour, so you can walk away and never come back to a page you can't type on.
A short blip each time input gets swallowed, so you can hear it working from across the room. Off by default.
No account, no analytics, no network requests of any kind. There is no server to send anything to.
Paw Report
Cat Mode counts every paw it blocks and remembers what your cat walked across. One click turns that into an image you can post anywhere.
Yours to tune
Name your cat, record the unlock combo you want, and pick how long the safety
timer waits. Your settings live in chrome.storage.sync, so they
follow you to every device you're signed into Chrome on.
Right on cue
Search for cat games or cat videos and Cat Mode offers to turn itself on, because that's the moment a paw is about to land on your keyboard. It reads the search term out of the URL and matches it against a fixed word list on your device. Nothing is transmitted, and it's built not to nag: strong matches only, never when Cat Mode is already on, silenced for six hours by Not now and for good by Never.
Getting out
Cat Mode blocks input on purpose, so every route back out is deliberate. Four of them, and not one depends on any of the others.
| Way out | Default | Works when |
|---|---|---|
| Unlock shortcut | Ctrl Shift K | The page has keyboard focus. Fully customisable. |
| Panic unlock | Ctrl/⌘ Shift 0 | Anywhere in the browser. Chrome dispatches it above the page. |
| Toolbar toggle | Click the icon | Always. The browser's own UI is never blocked. |
| Safety timer | 15 minutes | By itself, if you walk away. Set 5 min to 1 hour, or Never. |
Chrome only suggests the browser-wide combos. If one clashes with another
extension it's left unassigned, and no extension is allowed to set its own. If the
popup shows a shortcut as “Not set”, assign it yourself at
chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
Privacy
Cat Mode makes no network requests at all. Your settings, your cat's name and the paw counter are stored by your browser, on your machine. Two features touch page data, and both are worth saying out loud. They're optional, and they switch off in Settings.
Keeps the last 24 characters of keys Cat Mode had already blocked, keys that never reached the page. Overwritten every session, stored locally, never synced. Skipped entirely whenever a text box or password field has focus (including inside a web component's shadow DOM) and whenever Ctrl, Alt or ⌘ is held. It can only ever see input Cat Mode already stopped.
Reads the search-query parameter of the page's URL, plus the title on YouTube watch pages, to spot a cat-video search. The matching runs on your device against a fixed word list. No other page content is read, nothing is stored, nothing is sent.
FAQ
No, and no Chrome extension can. Extensions may only intercept input inside web pages. Anything the browser handles itself (Ctrl+W, the address bar, the tab strip) or anything outside Chrome needs an operating-system tool.
For the case this is built for, a pet on the keyboard while a video plays in the tab, page-level blocking covers it.
No. “Record what your cat typed” can only ever see keystrokes Cat Mode has already blocked from reaching the page, it stops the moment any text field has focus, it stops when a modifier is held, it caps at 24 characters, and it never leaves your device. It's off-switchable in one click. The extension makes no network requests, so there is nowhere for anything to go.
Four independent ways out, listed above: the page shortcut, the browser-wide panic shortcut, the toolbar toggle, and the automatic safety timer. The toolbar toggle works even if every other one fails, because Cat Mode never blocks the browser's own interface.
Content scripts only load into tabs opened after an extension is installed or updated. Cat Mode backfills already-open tabs on install and update, but if you hit it, open the popup and click Activate here, or just reload the tab.
It also never runs on chrome:// pages, the Chrome Web Store, or
the PDF viewer, because Chrome doesn't allow it. Nothing is blocked there, so
nothing needs unlocking.
Yes. It's a standard Manifest V3 extension, so any Chromium-based browser that can install from the Chrome Web Store will run it. Firefox and Safari use different extension APIs and aren't supported today.
Rabbits, dogs, toddlers, and anyone else who shouldn't be touching the keyboard while something is playing. It's also the easiest way to wipe down a keyboard or screen without setting off half your browser.