matrix-rain

High-performance, authentic The Matrix digital rain simulator for the terminal, written in Go.

Live Demo & Documentation: https://smford.github.io/matrix-rain/

• Authentic Matrix Aesthetics:
  • Half-width Katakana glyphs (single column width for crisp alignment), numerals, Latin characters, and symbols.
  • Glowing head characters with customizable 24-bit truecolor fading gradients.
  • In-place glyph mutations as characters cascade down the screen.
• SRE & Production Engineering Quality:
  • Zero Terminal Corruption Guarantee: Strict cleanup hooks for alternate screen buffer restoration, cursor recovery, and raw mode reset on exit, cancellation, or unexpected panics.
  • Low Overhead: Batch rendering with ANSI escape deduplication; minimal CPU and memory allocations even at high framerates.
  • Dynamic Terminal Resizing: Real-time terminal geometry adaptation via POSIX SIGWINCH.
  • Non-TTY Protection: Detects pipes or redirected streams and prevents ANSI escape pollution.
• Interactive Controls:
  • Live color palette cycling (Classic Green, Matrix Reloaded Cyan, Amber CRT, Blood Red, Monochrome, Rainbow).
  • Real-time pause, resume, density adjustments, and stream reset.

Install directly using the smford/homebrew-tap:

brew tap smford/tap
brew install matrix-rain

Or as a single command:

brew install smford/tap/matrix-rain

go install github.com/smford/matrix-rain/cmd/matrix-rain@latest

Download pre-compiled multi-architecture binaries (macOS Apple Silicon/Intel, Linux ARM64/AMD64, Windows) directly from the GitHub Releases page.

git clone https://github.com/smford/matrix-rain.git
cd matrix-rain
make build

The executable will be located at ./bin/matrix-rain.

Run with defaults:

matrix-rain

# Classic Matrix with high density at 60 FPS
matrix-rain -density 75 -fps 60

# Amber CRT phosphor style
matrix-rain -color amber -charset matrix

# Binary rain in cyberpunk cyan
matrix-rain -color cyan -charset binary

1. Automated Semantic Versioning:
   • Commits following Conventional Commits (feat:, fix:, feat!:) determine automatic semantic version bumps (patch, minor, major).
   • Manual releases can be triggered via workflow_dispatch or git tag push (git tag vX.Y.Z).
2. Multi-Architecture Release Pipeline:
   • GoReleaser builds and packages binaries for Darwin (ARM64 & AMD64), Linux (ARM64 & AMD64), and Windows.
   • Generates SHA256 checksums and automated release notes on GitHub Releases.
3. Automated Homebrew Tap Publishing:
   • The GoReleaser pipeline automatically pushes the updated formula and hashes to smford/homebrew-tap.
4. GitHub Pages Deployment:
   • Automatically builds and publishes the landing page at https://smford.github.io/matrix-rain/ from docs/.

# Run unit tests
make test

# Run tests with race detection
make test-race

# Run linter
make lint

matrix-rain/
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/
│       ├── ci.yml          # Tests, linting, race detection
│       ├── pages.yml       # GitHub Pages automated deployment
│       └── release.yml     # SemVer tagging, GoReleaser, Homebrew publish
├── cmd/
│   └── matrix-rain/
│       └── main.go         # CLI parsing, signal trapping, entrypoint
├── docs/
│   └── index.html          # Interactive landing page hosted on GitHub Pages
├── Formula/
│   └── matrix-rain.rb      # Reference Homebrew formula for smford/homebrew-tap
├── pkg/
│   └── matrix/
│       ├── chars.go        # Character sets & entropy generation
│       ├── chars_test.go   # Charset unit tests
│       ├── column.go       # Drop state, mutation, and column lifecycle
│       ├── column_test.go  # Column simulation unit tests
│       ├── matrix.go       # Engine loop, ANSI rendering, raw mode
│       ├── matrix_test.go  # Engine & resize unit tests
│       ├── signal_unix.go  # Unix SIGWINCH resize listener
│       ├── signal_windows.go # Windows resize fallback
│       ├── theme.go        # 24-bit Truecolor palettes and gradient calculation
│       └── theme_test.go   # Theme unit tests
├── .goreleaser.yaml        # GoReleaser v2 release and Homebrew formula config
├── Makefile                # Build, test, lint, install
└── README.md

MIT