Show HN: Matrix rain, Conway's Game of Life and Mandelbrot set for terminals (opens in new tab)

Great work! This is one of the best rain implementations I've seen.

A while back I implemented[0] a (pretty basic) Matrix rain in JavaScript that will pull your latest public GitHub contributions and use that for the rain text. Demo here[1]. And of course my useless Game of Life icons, golicaons[2] (demo [3]).

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/redpill

[1]: https://anderspitman.net/apps/redpill/

[2]: https://github.com/anderspitman/golicons

[3]: https://anderspitman.net/apps/golicons/

Back in the 80s when most people were using DOS text screens, we would sometime play a joke on a friend/coworker. We would get on their computer and run a small terminate-and-stay-resident (background process) program called rain.com. It would sit in the background while they ran their word processor or spreadsheet. After some time, it would cause one character to “fall” down the screen. They would see it happen and not know what was going on. Then it would make another charter fall. By then, the person would usually call out to someone else to come and look at this weird thing. But then the program would up the rate and start dropping multiple charters. It kept increasing the rate and eventually all of the characters on their screen had rained down and were in a pile on the bottom of the screen. At that point, we would press some key combination and their original screen would appear. That is usually when we would let them in on the joke and reboot their machine to remove the TSR Rain.

People didn’t lock their computers back then. :)

A long time ago I wrote gomatrix: https://github.com/GeertJohan/gomatrix

It's a Matrix emulator inspired by cmatrix. It doesnt have as many features as this posts one (e.g. just 2 colors for the kanas), but was a fun exercise to learn Go. Pull requests welcome :)

As a fan of terminals, matrix rain, Conway's game of life and Mandelbrot sets, this is relevant to my interests.

I few years ago I put together a basic Mandelbrot terminal animation:

https://gist.github.com/tylerneylon/e70a684b88809f74168f3a36...

It runs nicely in Python 2 (and slower in Python 3).

Here's a nice code golf Mandelbrot that also uses no image library (it produces a bmp file): https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/23465

Once everyone is working from home it is going to be prime time for terminal-based yak shaving.

I like the speed and dynamic aspects. Use of 256 colours means extra shades etc. Simple effect and very good.

Now I want to dust off my old snake game and upgrade it to 3D.

Oh boy, neither GCC nor Clang liked the Unicode one bit:

  $ make 2>&1 | head
  c++ -std=c++17 -Wall -Wextra -Os -MD -MP -MF cxxmatrix.dep -c -o cxxmatrix.o cxxmatrix.cpp
  In file included from cxxmatrix.cpp:595:
  glyph.inl:78:2: error: converting to execution character set: Invalid argument
     78 | {U'�', 21, {127, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 127, }},
        |  ^~~~
  glyph.inl:79:2: error: converting to execution character set: Invalid argument
     79 | {U'�', 21, {573695, 2072768, 104616, 104344, 37000, 1609860, 430211, }},
        |  ^~~~
  glyph.inl:80:2: error: converting to execution character set: Invalid argument
     80 | {U'�', 21, {164354, 260859, 2015779, 1221155, 692770, 429602, 1238014, }},

This is fantastic. What arguments should I pass ./cxxmatrix to get the mandelbrot set or game of life? Can't seem to get it to work / couldn't figure it out from the repo.

So very cool. I just built and installed it on my MacBook. Looks great on Apple's standard terminal, and I think a little bit better even on ITerm 2.

Those terminal matrix rain animations are always super slow for me at higher resolution. Using two cores 100%.

Maybe because I run through WSL?

Runs noticeably faster for me if I change -Os to -Ofast

Needed to run make twice but it’s running on a raspberry pi 4 + raspbin stable.

This is so cool! Thank you for the great effort.