Matrix Rain
The famous Matrix rain effect of falling green characters in a terminal with node.
Installation
npm install -g matrix-rain
Usage
usage: matrix-rain [-h] [-v] [-d {h,v}]
[-c {green,red,blue,yellow,magenta,cyan,white}]
[-k {ascii,binary,braille,emoji,katakana}] [-f FILEPATH]
The famous Matrix rain effect of falling green characters as a cli command
Optional arguments:
-h, --help Show this help message and exit.
-d, --direction {h,v}
Change direction of rain. h=horizontal, v=vertical
-c , --color {green,red,blue,yellow,magenta,cyan,white}
Rain color. NOTE: droplet start is always white
-k, --char-range {ascii,binary,braille,emoji,katakana}
Use rain characters from char-range
-f, --file-path FILEPATH
Read characters from a file instead of random
characters from char-range
Screenshots
Story Time
On 2016 christmas eve, I watched the The Matrix (1999) and was inspired by the matrix rain effect. I was curious to see if I could replicate this effect in nodejs.
There's blessed and node-ncurses which would have helped but rather than using the library I wanted to learn how console cursor manipulation works behind the scenes. I browsed through the source code of colors.js and got a few pointers. On that day I discovered terminal escape codes VT100 ANSI codes table. There is also the comprehensive xterm control sequences documentation ctlseqs.
Node's process.stdout has a columns and rows property. It also fires resize events like the browser. With escape codes I can treat the terminal as a canvas and paint on it. I discovered a new medium to show my art.
In general its very possible to build interactive terminal apps with great UX that are lightweight and blazing fast. I'm on that journey.
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