I wrote a simple terminal program of Matrix digital rain. A part of the purpose of this program is to test the performance of terminal emulators. Another purpose is just for fun. Enjoy it with fast terminals (e.g., urxvt, alacritty, terminology, etc.)!

Features

• Hankaku kana characters as in the original film
• Ten levels of "green"s using terminal 256 color support
• Twinkling effects by adding random brightness fluctuations
• Diffused reflection effects by cell background colors

Scenes

By default, the following scenes will be visited in turn. If you want to see each scene, please see the help (cxxmatrix --help).

1. Number falls
2. Banner - Show command line arguments by shining characters
3. "The Matrix" rain - Wikipedia
4. Conway's Game of Life - Wikipedia
5. The Mandelbrot set - Wikipedia
6. (End scene) "The Matrix" rain

• cxxmatrix in 80x28 - Youtube
• The Mandelbrot set in 479x186 - YouTube
• Highlight scenes - See the animated GIF below

This program is provided under the MIT License.

Requirements:

• git, C++17 compiler, GNU make, GNU awk
• UTF-8 support of the system
• a fast terminal with 256color and UTF-8 support

$ git clone https://github.com/akinomyoga/cxxmatrix.git
$ cd cxxmatrix
$ make
$ ./cxxmatrix 'The Matrix' 'Reloaded'

Quit: C-c; Suspend: C-z; Menu: RET, C-m

Options

Check the help with cxxmatrix --help:

$ ./cxxmatrix --help
cxxmatrix (C++ Matrix)
usage: cxxmatrix [OPTIONS...] [[--] MESSAGE...]

MESSAGE
   Add a message for 'banner' scene.  When no messages are specified, a
   message "C++ MATRIX" will be used.

OPTIONS
   --help      Show help
   --          The rest arguments are processed as MESSAGE
   -m, --message=MESSAGE
               Add a message for 'banner' scene.
   -s, --scene=SCENE
               Add scenes. Comma separated list of 'number', 'banner', 'rain',
               'conway', 'mandelbrot', 'rain-forever' and 'loop'.
   -c, --color=COLOR
               Set color. One of 'default', 'black', 'red', 'green', 'yellow',
               'blue', 'magenta', 'cyan', 'white', and integer 0-255 (256 index
               color).
   --frame-rate=NUM
               Set the frame rate per second.  A positive number less than or
               equal to 1000. The default is 25.
   --error-rate=NUM
               Set the factor for the rate of character changes.  A
               non-negative number.  The default is 1.0.
   --diffuse
   --no-diffuse
               Turn on/off the background-color effect.  Turned on by default.
   --twinkle
   --no-twinkle
               Turn on/off the twinkling effect.  Turned on by default.
   --preserve-background
   --no-preserve-background
               Preserve terminal background or not.  Not preserve by default.
   --rain-density=NUM
               Set the factor for the density of rain drops.  A positive
               number.  The default is 1.0.

Keyboard
   C-c (SIGINT)  Quit
   C-z (SIGTSTP) Suspend
   
   C-m, RET      Show menu

Select scenes

# Example: Show the Mandelbrot set
./cxxmatrix -s mandelbrot

# Example: Loop Number falls and Conway's Game of Life
./cxxmatrix -s number,conway,loop

$ sudo make install

The default install prefix is /usr/local. /usr/local/bin/cxxmatrix and /usr/local/share/man/man1/cxxmatrix.1.gz will be created. To change the install prefix, please specify the make variable PREFIX:

# Example 1
sudo make PREFIX=/opt/cxxmatrix install

# Example 2
make PREFIX=~/.local install

• AUR Package: AUR (en) - cxxmatrix-git by @ignapk
• FreeBSD Package: misc/cxxmatrix by @nunotexbsd (Nuno Teixeira <[email protected]>)

Related tags in GitHub

• #matrix-rain
• #matrix-digital-rain

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• Chuvas da Matrix - YouTube