THE MATRIX DIGITAL RAIN

12 JANUARY 2024

The famous digital rain from the movie The Matrix implemented in C for the Unix terminal without using any GUI/TUI kits:

Domsson’s Fakesteak inspired this project. I added the following features while trying to keep the original project’s simplicity intact as much as possible:

  • Customize the rain color to match the theme of the setup.
  • Support for UTF-32 characters.
  • The ghosting effect of old monochrome displays.
  • The rain more closely resembles the original from the first movie.

To use them, you need a terminal emulator that supports 24-bit RGB colors and Unicode characters.

The background, head, and tail colors of the rain can be configured via COLOR_BG_*, COLOR_HD_*, and COLOR_TL_* settings. The UNICODE_MIN and UNICODE_MAX values control the character set used for the rain. For instance, use 0x30A1 and 0x30F6 for Katakana:

Happy ricing!

Files: source.tar.gz