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
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