Console candy

Ternimal

This find is pure eye candy. It creates an animated life form in your terminal, which you can watch evolve and change within the confines of your safe character space. Playing with the many arguments can change the appearance of the life form from a worm-like snake to a swarm of angry will-o'-the-wisp after drinking too much caffeine. Colors, thickness, number of segments, size of arcs, and gradients can all be changed. While it serves no particular purpose, there are a few good reasons for trying it out.

One reason is that it puts your console under stress. This makes it an ideal burn-in tool for testing your environment, or perhaps comparing different consoles on your desktop. Because it works within Screen or tmux, it can also help you see how your console scales or works over a network. It's also implemented with Unicode characters providing the blocks that draw the animation. That means you can also test for Unicode support and speed; it helps you see whether the blocks assigned to those Unicode characters work as they should within the confines of your terminal.

The code is written in Rust, making this an excellent example to open up and take a look at if you want to learn a modern high-performance language that can do cool things on the command line. Installation is as simple as downloading the code and building it with the Rust compiler. While the 1,000-plus lines of code make this more than a simple hack, everything is well commented and easy enough to understand, making the addition of a few extra life forms or color modes the perfect place to get started with a little Rust programming.

Project Website

https://github.com/p-e-w/ternimal

Test your terminal's Unicode support with Ternimal.

Bookmark manager