cmatrix – Falling ASCII Characters

📅 February 9, 2024
“I want to impress others who look over my shoulder.”

In a world of point, click, and swipe, nothing scares people like the command line.

Well, let’s put some real fear into them with cmatrix!

Just let this run in its own terminal adjacent to BpyTOP or bmon to geek out your desktop.

Install

sudo apt install cmatrix

Usage

In a terminal, just enter,

cmatrix

cmatrix displays green ASCII characters in a falling pattern. Nonstop.

“Is that all it does?”

Yes.

You can resize the terminal to fill the maximum vertical space of the desktop for longer falls.

The effect is interesting to watch. While it does nothing practical, it does lend a feel of “tech” to the Linux terminal. Surprisingly, the man page lists a number of command line options and live changes from boldness, color, speed, and more.

While running, some keystrokes affect behavior:

• a – Asynchronous scrolling. Lines will fall a various speeds instead of all characters falling at the same speed.
• b – Make some characters bold at random
• B – Make all characters bold
• n – Disable bold characters and set all to normal color
• 0-9 changes the speed. 0 = fastest. 1 = faster. 9 = slowest. Useful if running multiple cmatrix terminals so each can have its own speed.
• q = Exit cmatrix
• Change Colors:
  • ! = red
  • @ = green
  • # = yellow / dull orange
  • $ = dark blue
  • % = magenta
  • ^ = cyan
  • & = white

Slow, asynchronous falling with random bold characters.

cmatrix -abu 8

Fast falling with random bold characters and a magenta color.

cmatrix -bu 1 -C magenta

Now, this is what I call a desktop!

Oh! The man page warns that this program is CPU intensive, so be aware.

Have fun!