TTE: Terminal Text Effects

https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/showroom/

by makapuf • 2 years ago

1830 267 2 years ago

chrisbuilds.github.io

tambourine_man• 2 years ago

This is awesome. Thanks

devdao• 2 years ago

Love it, thanks for posting!

jimbobthrowawy• 2 years ago

Incredibly goofy, I like it. Especially the demo gifs on the page. Wonder how long until I see it be the default output for a CLI I'm using. Got surprised to see someone using lolcat in the wild before.

PhilipRoman• 2 years ago

Great work, this will make a lovely splash screen for my tty-only machine.

mickeyp2• 2 years ago

In a similar vein in Emacs: M-x zone

Every time you run it, it triggers a random screen saver effect. Fun when it's on a timer and triggers so your work colleagues wonder wth is going on.

dmd2• 2 years ago

I just get a blank emacs buffer when I run that.

erk__• 2 years ago

Even if you run it in a buffer that is already full with text? Zone mode only really works if you have text in the buffer.

wwarner• 2 years ago

dude thanks

Exuma• 2 years ago

Or neovim … cellular automaton

mickeyp2• 2 years ago

Emacs has game of life also. M-x life.

gothicbluebird2• 2 years ago

good one! The editor macros collection never ceases to amaze even after years of working daily in it.

teddyh• 2 years ago

M-x zone

Available in the menu: Tools → Games → Zone Out

nanna• 2 years ago

Thanks for everything you do for the Emacs community, mickeyp. I've learned so much from https://www.masteringemacs.org/

behnamoh• 2 years ago

Next time someone donks Python for being incapable of building decent CLI tools, I'll burn their terminal using TTE.

I know Go has the crown for creating TUI apps, but Python isn't that awful. If the app doesn't need concurrency (like a terminal file manager [0] does), then Python is fine.

[0]: Yazzi (Rust) eats Ranger's (Python) lunch and dinner combined.

benrutter• 2 years ago

I freaking love this library! It reminds me of a time that I don't even know happened when computers seemed like a scifi possibility come true. So happy to see it on the front page.

One of the coolest things is not just the ability to pipe cat outputs into it, but that it doubles up as a python library- next time you're making a throw away CLI with print outs and prompts, why not make it insanely jazzy?

endgame• 2 years ago

It's fun for silly stuff, but I've definitely been on enough slow links that I wouldn't put it in a serious tool.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I think it's really cool, but I wouldn't use it as a universal hammer.

natpalmer17763• 2 years ago

On the contrary, I am currently scaffolding out the template projects for a new system at $DAYJOB and I'm seriously considering putting it in the CLI tool template.

On the one hand, these tools are going to be used for Serious Business™ but on the other hand... I owe it to 14 year old me. I'll probably add something to allow disabling it with a flag file that can be created with the tool or manually. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

toast0• 2 years ago

I agree, a serious tool should be taking into account the length of the output delay and reducing effects to match the conditions. But you can still do some of it, sometimes.

xoac• 2 years ago

Someone will add this to their javascript framework cli

sciencesama• 2 years ago

Now we need this in esp32 !!

filoleg• 2 years ago

This is great, thanks!

My favorite is Beams (the one at the very top of the page), reminds me of MGS1 “game over” screen animation a lot.

keploy2• 2 years ago

This is cool! we can utilize the 'Burn' or 'ErrorCorrect' effects to highlight warnings or errors in logs dynamically, ensuring critical issues stand out in ongoing terminal output.

panki27• 2 years ago

No. No, you don't. No one investigating log files wants animations playing in them.

keploy2• 2 years ago

Haha..I get where you're coming from. However, tool that show reports and outputs, that are CLI-first, can get a lot of help in improving the developer experience. Honestly, I was looking for something like this for my tool!

leetrout• 2 years ago

I'm glad to see we all take the same approach to these sorts of things ^_^

  self.move_cursor_to_top()
  sys.stdout.write(output_string)
  sys.stdout.flush()

cl3misch2• 2 years ago

Would there be a more canonical way do do this?

nine_k• 2 years ago

Back in the day (around 1990) I implemented a gif-like effect for terminals, which happened to be old monochrome hardware terminals on slow (9600?) RS-232 ports, attached to a venerable PDP-11.

It took several text files with ASCII "pictures" (character data only, no control codes, 80x24) as animation frames, and calculated simple per-line "diffs". Then it generated a sequence of cursor movements to only update the affected areas, skipping large parts of the picture.

That made it much faster than the naive overwriting the whole screenfuls from top, with a visible delay between parts of the screen. My version was able to run "simultaneous" small animations quickly at distant parts of the screen, because they took very few bytes to navigate to and update.

   *
     *. 
  * o/
  -/M 
   _H_

E.g. a "juggler" like this could juggle quickly, inside a mostly stationary "circus", with "flags" waving high above on top of it.

With current terminals giving you 60fps in true-color mode, it makes little sense, of course.

deathanatos• 2 years ago

Not redrawing the parts of the screen that don't need to be redrawn. There's going to be a tradeoff between the amount of works the terminal has to do parsing the input stream, the amount of work the terminal has to do to redraw/update its own buffer, and the amount of work necessary in the program to compute the necessary move commands.

IIRC, ncurses does this under the hood.

m4632• 2 years ago

I think the canonical way would be to ship this in some sort of hard-to-uninstall snap or flatpack package.

throwanem8• 2 years ago

This is amazing! Please never ever use it in production.

distortionfield3• 2 years ago

Idk I wouldn’t mind one or two of these as loading screens or something.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 2 years ago

As a developer-only tool, I’m sure most of my coworkers would love the attention to details.

radlad• 2 years ago

What CLI tools have a slow enough boot to require a loading screen? I'm sure there are some but...

The only one that comes to mine for me is FileBot[0] - and if the loading screen made it take ANY additional time, I'd be annoyed.

[0] https://www.filebot.net/

traverseda• 2 years ago

No. I still sometimes need to use a TTY over MOSH over a satellite connection.

No.

ykonstant2• 2 years ago

Why not?

throwanem8• 2 years ago

Imagine that the CLI tool you use most often every day - a compiler, a package manager, like that - adds animations like these in common operations. Now you have to wait for the animation to finish before you can continue your work. How do you feel about that?

yjftsjthsd-h2• 2 years ago

Prod should be as robust and straightforward as possible; no distractions, no noise, no extra overhead. This is neat, but not useful, and it adds distractions and delays.

echelon• 2 years ago

These are beautiful.

What I'd really like to see is this supported in the terminal emulator itself as an idle mode, i.e. don't run this in the buffer directly, but rather as a second buffer. This could function like a "screen saver". Once you interact, your primary terminal would be fully restored.

hedora2• 2 years ago

s/fully/gradually/

I’d love some of these effects to fade in/out within live terminal sessions.

hnlmorg3• 2 years ago

As long as readability wasn’t affected though.

jdoss• 2 years ago

I was thinking about how fun it would be to add this my Python CLI [0] I made for launching Fedora CoreOS locally with QEMU for testing ignition, but with a flag that is turned off by default. Using the burn effect in TTE when launching a VM with my CLI would be so cool.

This instantly reminded me about Ansible and how it annoyed me that ANSIBLE_NOCOWS had to be enabled to disable the default output of Ansible with cowsay [1].

[0] https://github.com/quickvm/bupy

[1] https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/10530

jimmaswell3• 2 years ago

On a further tangent, that reminds me of two of my favorite things to install on a Linux system, ponysay and ascii-pony/systempony. I set each of my systems to a different character to show on bash logins with systempony (WSL instances included)

https://github.com/erkin/ponysay

https://blog.yjl.im/2016/01/ascii-pony-systempony-screenshot...

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Hot damn, I have to respect the author for shutting down any attempt to make him give in to the pressure.

All these serious enterprise people worried about their cows, but then they do install ‘cowsay’ on their systems xD

barryrandall• 2 years ago

Please use this to reboot Trade Wars 2002.

harwoodr• 2 years ago

Oddly enough, I was just thinking about that sort of thing...

flir4• 2 years ago

BBS Doors! I knew this reminded me of something (in a good way).

Aldipower• 2 years ago

You do not know how my production looks like. I _will_ use it in production!

layer82• 2 years ago

You work on screensavers?

layer82• 2 years ago

Who wants to actually read text anyway.

notnmeyer• 2 years ago

all my run books use this

neilv5• 2 years ago

I propose that developers are allowed to use it in production... so long as they do all the development work on a 9600 baud dialup with a VT102.

neilv5• 2 years ago

A few years ago, a submarine cable was knocked out, between our startup's MVP servers in Singapore AWS, and our networked factory stations in Asia.

In lieu of the submarine cable, something closer to a wet string was being routed over. It had such high latency and packet loss, that a watchdog timer I'd implemented on the stations was timing out.

Fortunately, the remote access we'd built into our stations (SSH and OpenVPN) still worked, albeit at slow speeds, like a 300 baud dialup, and crazy-high latency.

Having occasionally dealt with performance a bit like that as a kid, and knowing my way around Linux, it was like "I've been training my whole life for this moment."

So I just flexed the old command-line-and-editor-when-you-feel-every-byte-transmitted skill, and got the stations working, before the factory even knew about the submarine cable, saving our infinite-9s uptime.

It was nothing compared to what NASA does, but terminal animation effects would've ended both of our missions.

jimmaswell3• 2 years ago

I actually am getting a VT320 soon that I hope to be able to use for my terminal at work. I'll run these over it if I remember.

mirekrusin• 2 years ago

It can work we just need brave soul to make it client side.

1propionyl• 2 years ago

Agreed. It's not nearly as battle-tested as key operations tooling like `sl` and `gti`.

m4632• 2 years ago

Uh, we accidentally shipped it as our fintech startup screen.

omoikane• 2 years ago

Please do use it in demoscene productions. We need more textmode demos.

voidhorse• 2 years ago

It would be great for the startup screens of terminal games.

xyst4• 2 years ago

Challenge accepted.

emmelaich4• 2 years ago

It'd be good if it recognised https://no-color.org/ and just didn't do anything. Or maybe replaced with <cool effect removed here>

Maybe it does, I didn't check.

x1874638• 2 years ago

It does have a --no-color flag.

That being said, there are some environment variables that could be referenced. I'll add this one to the list for a future update.

xigoi• 2 years ago

What if I want colors, but not animations?

smrtinsert• 2 years ago

But if you do, include emoji animations

noufalibrahim• 2 years ago

I'd love to use it while teaching.

natpalmer17763• 2 years ago

./myfancytool -nofx -doingbusiness -pwn "the_ops"

terminaltrove• 2 years ago

The effects on this project is incredible, thanks for building this!

bredren• 2 years ago

These effects remind me of some of the first programming I ever did: animated ASCII art for local BBS’s.

I remember dumping an entire day into something resembling Spider-Man. Was very exciting when a sysop put my work into their login sequence.

guidoism3• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the drip.com TSR program that I put on some of the school computers circa 1990.

glonq3• 2 years ago

Yeah in 1991 our college lab's MSDOS PC's were unsecured (unsecurable!?), so our prof quickly learned to regret teaching us how to write TSR's in ASM.

guidoism3• 2 years ago

Ours had PS-2s on a token ring network with a TUI to get to the word processor etc but it also had a “drop down to DOS” option that the teachers didn’t know about.

makach• 2 years ago

oh how fun this must have been to implement these effects. absolutely love it!

nickdothutton2• 2 years ago

So much energy going into the command line/terminal at the moment. Reminds me a lot of BBS art of my youth. Where are my TheDraw crew?

vunderba• 2 years ago

These effects would pair really well with an old school bbs/mud simulation.

flir4• 2 years ago

Retro-cyberpunk aesthetic.

Hacking game?

Gormo• 2 years ago

Or a non-simulated BBS or MUD.

TeeMassive• 2 years ago

Kind of tools I wish I had a use case for.

cbm-vic-20• 2 years ago

There's a bit of lag on my VT420.

lsllc• 2 years ago

Even at 19200 baud?

eliasson• 2 years ago

Wow, this is astonishing!

influx• 2 years ago

Code looks very clean, congrats. I wish for selfish reasons this was written in Go, so I could stuff the binary somewhere easily :)

chambored2• 2 years ago

I could see this idea being used in a lot of the charm.sh products.

glonq3• 2 years ago

All gorgeous, but I'd like to see more quick/simple ones like 'Expand' because the slower ones would probably become tedious real quick after the initial novelty wears off.

x1874638• 2 years ago

Dev here: I agree, it's actually a line item in my todo list. That being said, many of them can be made to be very quick via command line arguments without losing the spirit of the effect.

flir4• 2 years ago

That's a delightful thing you've made.

Have you added a command-line switch for the direction of gravity?

Some of the animations (eg Pour), could fall up the screen instead of down it. That way, the user can start reading the text immediately.

junon• 2 years ago

Chalk maintainer here. These are incredible. Some of the best I've ever seen. Kudos.

sghiassy• 2 years ago

What magic sorcery are you using here!?!

Bravo!

liveoneggs• 2 years ago

brings the magic of an ANSI BBS to your terminal and more

aryeshalev• 2 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking. Used to make ANSI animation with THEDRAW back in the day

p2hari• 2 years ago

This is so cool. Thanks for this.

jhallenworld• 2 years ago

The descriptions are fun. So it needs the "Bounty Bob Stikes Back!" effect: birds deliver each letter, then stand proudly on top of the sign:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18n-MBlVIvw

x1874638• 2 years ago

Oh, I like this. It’s going on the list of ideas. Thanks.

redconfetti• 2 years ago

truly l337

MikeTheGreat• 2 years ago

This is awesome. I'm like 99% sure I saw some of these effects in some of my late-80's CRPG type games :)

It looks like the color gradient is per-pixel, not per-character. Would anyone have any idea how the package does that?

chuckadams• 2 years ago

Barring a zoomed screenshot that shows otherwise, I'm quite certain it's per-character. Operating in true color mode is what makes the color transitions smooth enough to make the optical illusion work.

x1874638• 2 years ago

Dev here: You are correct. It's using 24-bit color ANSI escape codes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#24-bit

g3ol4d0• 2 years ago

fucking amazing

buildsjets2• 2 years ago

Rather reminds me of Nick Black's Notcurses library.

https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses

https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

buildsjets2• 2 years ago

Video Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY

jamboca• 2 years ago

Amazing, does this type of thing exist for like my website that i can use in a css or something i can import? What a cool style... or if it doesn't exist how might we make something like that?

porcoda• 2 years ago

Wow - this is very cool and gives me strong nostalgia for Commodore-64/128 demos and old-school BBS's. I remember spending hours on my Commodore 64 doing this sort of thing by hand for the little BBS that I ran out of my bedroom.

TazeTSchnitzel• 2 years ago

If ascii art animation brings joy to you, you might enjoy “BB: the portable demo”. On Debian, it's `sudo apt install bb` I think.

gary_02• 2 years ago

No "The Matrix" effect? That was one of the earliest programs I wrote back in 2000, and I was so proud of myself.

hinkley3• 2 years ago

I can tell I'm too old now because I expected the Matrix projection to be in the first four examples and it's not even on the page.

gary_02• 2 years ago

It's not me that's too old, it's the world that's too young.

akira2501• 2 years ago

I was hoping for the "no more secrets" effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5bAa6gFvLs

x1874638• 2 years ago

TTE dev here:

Haha, a matrix effect is actually in progress. I want it to be as close to the original as possible. Most implementations actually miss some subtle details. I've watched the original effect in a clip repeatedly and it has surprised me with its complexity beyond what I originally thought. Sometimes the characters shift in place but other times the entire column drops. The top characters in a given column change brightness in interesting ways, too. It'll be in a future release, for sure.

verst2• 2 years ago

Looks amazing!

Does anyone know why the "ColorShift" style doesn't animate as shown? When I run this each row cycles through colors from top to bottom, but there is no left to right / right to left color change at all. That's the only style not rendering correctly among 10 different ones I tried.

I tried with iTerm2 and Terminal app.

x7001• 2 years ago

That demo isn't actually the default config. Here's how you can recreate it.

ll | tte colorshift --travel --travel-direction radial --loop

verst2• 2 years ago

Cool, thanks for that!

divbzero• 2 years ago

Awesome! Someone please use this in a film or TV show.

yumraj2• 2 years ago

While making sure to credit the author..

jfl0• 2 years ago

or even pay them!

alfalfasprout• 2 years ago

Now this is the kind of stuff I want to see more of on HN. Really cool!

hinkley3• 2 years ago

I'm imagining several genres of text based adventures that could make very good use of this library. Cyberpunk, fantasy, and horror.

Very subtle uses of this could go a long way.

koromak• 2 years ago

I was immediately thinking of ADOM and NetHack. Would have been so cool.

joquarky• 2 years ago

I was suddenly reminded of ZZT while watching the demos.

jasonjmcghee• 2 years ago

Would love to see a falling sand simulator- many of the effects look like great candidates for making it feel satisfying.

nickstinemates5• 2 years ago

I integrated this[1] with my MOTD on ssh login.. :) With random effect each time.

1: https://keeb.dev/static/login.mp4

dxxvi• 2 years ago

looks both cool and frustrating :)

nickstinemates5• 2 years ago

It would be if I logged in a lot! and you can always ctrl+c if you're in a hurry.

shibeprime• 2 years ago

Cool use case! How do you make it choose a random effect?

nickstinemates5• 2 years ago

I wrote a simple shell script which does it for me

m-GDEV• 2 years ago

This is super cool

xyst4• 2 years ago

getting this into my production system now ...

fragmede5• 2 years ago

I also integrated on my ssh server. try sshing to funky.nondeterministic.computer

michaelmior• 2 years ago

Well played…

nickstinemates5• 2 years ago

I enjoyed that!

nickdothutton2• 2 years ago

Wonderful.

crazygringo• 2 years ago

Kudos to you.

keeganpoppen• 2 years ago

you beautiful bastard... i knew what was going to happen, had multiple chances to not do it, but i just had to see it through...

yumraj2• 2 years ago

How do you do that? If possible share the script please..

vulkoingim• 2 years ago

You can do something like:

    printssh() {
        tte --input-file YOUR_FILE --frame-rate=500 $(echo "beams binarypath blackhole bouncyballs bubbles burn colorshift crumble decrypt errorcorrect expand fireworks middleout     orbittingvolley overflow pour print rain randomsequence rings scattered slice slide spotlights spray swarm synthgrid unstable vhstape waves wipe" | tr ' ' '\n' | shuf -n 1)
        ssh "$@"
    }
    alias ssh="printssh"

nickstinemates5• 2 years ago

Anything in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc gets executed in sequence, so at the bottom of it I have

    /home/keeb/code/projects/login/motd.sh

And the contents of that file is...

    #!/usr/bin/env zsh

    values=("bubbles" "slide" "beams" "rain" "pour" "synthgrid" "unstable" "poop")
    len=${#values[@]}
    index=$(( (RANDOM % (len - 1)) + 1 ))
    selected=${values[$index]}
    cat /home/keeb/code/projects/login/motd | tte $selected

adr1an• 2 years ago

Can't wait to find these in TV shows!

Bytamine• 2 years ago

Yeah, I can see some "hacker" using Decrypt effect.

wpm• 2 years ago

It's straight out of Sneakers (1992).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS3npSv8iuM

Anyone want to shut down the Federal Reserve?

kstrauser• 2 years ago

"Why's everyone upvoting some article about text? ... OMG I LOVE THIS."

That's brilliant. I love it. This is the kind of whimsical thing done purely for the love of it that makes my day.

dancemethis• 2 years ago

One of the most pleasing things I've seen in a long, long while.

no-dr-onboard• 2 years ago

Part of me hopes this reignites a new era of scareware. The other part says wow this would be really cool for a SSH banner

xyst4• 2 years ago

nickstinemates already beat you to it [1]

[1] https://keeb.dev/static/login.mp4

AYBABTME• 2 years ago

I want this in charm.sh

xyst4• 2 years ago

Reminds me of my old geocities site when I was a kid. Copy and pasted HTML from many websites to get that "hax0r" feel.

Now I can get that nostalgia in my terminal

spudlyo• 2 years ago

export TERM=dumb

fragmede5• 2 years ago

A quick peruse through the code doesn't reveal checking of the TERM environment variable.

derefr3• 2 years ago

Very cool! But I’m just a bit sad that this is “just” a set of effects implemented on top of the same old standard ANSI escape codes as primitives.

I’ve been waiting for one or more terminal emulators to get together and add some ridiculous new escape codes, such that animated effects (or things like collapsible sections, font size, “form-input-ness” and “form-button-ness” ala 3270, etc) all get treated as part of the state of a given character cell / run of character cells.

Heck, it’s 2024; an application should be able to use an escape code to set a soft-word-wrap mode for longer-than-viewport-width text, and have the TTY render text accordingly, rather than everything being hard-wrapped (baked mode) or not wrapped at all (raw mode) and only being able to get soft-wrapping using a pager!

(There’s precisely one thing like this I’m aware of terminal emulators adding in recent memory: clickable links, ca. six years ago.)

emmelaich4• 2 years ago

"Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?"

93 points by andrewstuart on Sept 8, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 63 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412687

mkotowski• 2 years ago

(There’s precisely one thing like this I’m aware of terminal emulators adding in recent memory: clickable links, ca. six years ago.)

And they are often disabled by default, as a potential security risk. We don't get to have fun things, do we? (also worth read: CVE-2003-0063, abusing escape seq is unfortunately a valid concern against adding more stuff).

On the other hand, more and more emulators are adding support for various graphic protocols (sixel, iTerm2 format, kitty format).

I’ve been waiting for one or more terminal emulators to get together and add some ridiculous new escape codes[...]

Well, it's not much, but mintty apparently has some interesting stuff like audio support[0], and codes for font size and font family[1][2].

iTerm2 also has a bunch of custom escape sequences of varying level of usefulness starting from displaying fireworks animation on cursor position to sending system notifications[3] (although sadly I could not get the last one to work for me).

For some semblance of forms, you can check bubbles[4] and gum[5] (binary to easily incorporate the components into shell scripts).

[0] https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/CtrlSeqs#audio-support

[1] https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/CtrlSeqs#font-size

[2] https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/Tips#alternative-fonts

[3] https://iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

[4] https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles

[5] https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum

derefr3• 2 years ago

And they are often disabled by default, as a potential security risk.

Well, that and a clickable link would conflict with mouse reporting if both were active at once.

Given that mouse reporting exists, and "has precedence" due to its age, I think iTerm's choice — to style the anchor-SGR text either way, but to only make them actually act like links rather than text if you hold a modifier key — is the only "correct" behavior for rendering anchor-SGR text, regardless of security concerns.

But that really wouldn't be true for most other potential novel graphical-rendition "styles." Anything that's non-interactive could certainly be on by default.

follower• 2 years ago

[...] waiting for one or more terminal emulators to get together and add some ridiculous new escape codes [...]

I'm definitely of the opinion[0] that we haven't yet reached the limits of the "terminal emulator" UX paradigm.

The past few years do seem to have seen a resurgence in terminal emulator innovation due in part to a combination of new languages, the prevalence of GPUs, and a realisation that many of the existing terminal emulators weren't interested in any innovation in certain directions.

I've particularly been interested in the possibilities provided by the Terminal Graphics Protocol (which I discuss more in the linked comment).

A couple of years ago I switched to WezTerm[2] due to a combination of its graphics support, implementation language (Rust) and that its main developer seems to be interested in a combination of both solid support for existing standards & opportunities for innovation.

WezTerm also provides opportunities for customisation both in terms of shell integrations and of the application itself[3].

[...] new escape codes [...]

Also, on this aspect, it may not even be necessary to create new escape codes--recently I discovered the `terminfo(5)` man page actually makes a pretty interesting read[7], in part because it lists some existing escape codes that seem like they have potential for re-use/re-implementation in the current day's more graphic-based systems.

---- footnotes ----

[0] As I mentioned in a recent comment on a thread[1] here:

"Motivated by the thought that at the current point in time perhaps the 'essence' of a 'terminal' is its linear 'chronological' presentation of input/interaction/output history rather than its use of 'text'."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40475538

[2] https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

[3] While I'm definitely not a fan of the choice of Lua as the extension language, I have now at least hit my head against the wall[4] with it enough that I can actually get more complex custom functionality working.

[4] I've started to write up some of my Lua-related[5] notes & more general WezTerm[6] notes so hopefully it'll eventually be an easier road for others. :)

[5] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/floss-various-contribs/-/blob...

[6] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[7] As one does. :) It was a fascinating/amusing time capsule in terms(!) of mentions of weird hardware terminal quirks that at one time ("before my time") needed to be worked around; interesting escape code discoveries; and, the mention of a term I had not thought of for decades but was at one time of importance: NLQ! :D

derefr3• 2 years ago

[0] As I mentioned in a recent comment on a thread[1] here:
"Motivated by the thought that at the current point in time perhaps the 'essence' of a 'terminal' is its linear 'chronological' presentation of input/interaction/output history rather than its use of 'text'."

I somewhat object to this.

If you think of a TTY/PTY as an Abstract Data Type, it's a very specific (and clever) one. It's not just a transcript of bytes that flowed through the wire.

Rather, a TTY/PTY is five distinct but inter-related things:

1. a (passive) character-cell viewport grid, of (at any given time) a fixed size, where each cell holds not only a character as data, but also a set of metadata/annotations attached to it (the particular metadata being dependent on the implementation)

2. an active "brush" state for the viewport grid — this includes things like a cursor position, an active foreground and background color, etc.

3. a byte pipe "but better" — in that it's actually a multi-subscriber byte message-queue, plus (only in baked mode) message persistence into an expandable ring buffer, with logical line-oriented consumer-group cursoring to trigger forward-truncation of said buffer

4. a rendering agent with a rendering ruleset (or, in old-school TTY terms, a "line discipline") that sits as one consumer of the byte pipe; reacts to characters in the byte pipe by writing them to the cursor position in the viewport grid; and reacts to in-band messages by manipulating the "brush", making big changes to the viewport grid (e.g. clearing it entirely), and/or swapping out the rendering ruleset itself

5. (the part everyone forgets about) a replay stream-conversion function, that can convert the current state of the viewport grid + its brush, into a stream of characters + in-band messages, such that the rendering agent would parse that stream back into the current viewport + brush state

The clever function you get from this set of components, can be seen in the case of attaching a "client" TTY/PTY to an existing persistent "server" TTY/PTY, such as is created by something like tmux or docker — or even by /bin/login on an old-school terminal server that you've dialed into.

When a client like telnet, ssh, docker-exec, tmux-attach, etc. attaches to an existing backing PTY (either locally or remotely), the client either establishes its own "replica PTY" or reuses the one it's running attached to, and then wants to establish replication from the backing PTY into this replica PTY.

To get a coherent replica, that doesn't just paint garbage at a random position with a random brush, several things need to happen:

• the client needs to reset its own local PTY a known-neutral brush state;

• the client needs to set an ACK position in the byte-stream, and a memorized brush state, for the remote PTY (usually both of these are done implicitly by the syscall on the remote end that opens the PTY for reading);

• the client needs to fetch from the backing PTY, an implementation-neutral byte stream representing the current contents of the character viewport grid of the PTY — and replay that (i.e. it needs to trigger the replay stream-conversion function) — this also happens implicitly, such that when the remote end open(2)s its its PTY, the current state is serialized and dumped into a buffer for read(2)s on the PTY to read;

• the client needs to set up its local terminal's brush to match the memorized one that was set as of its ACK position on the remote.

Once these four things happen, the client can in theory simply shunt the remote PTY's byte-pipe into the local PTY's byte-pipe, select(2)ing and write(2)ing in a loop on a thread; whereupon the local PTY's rendering agent will handle reducing that stream to the visual grid.

In practice, though, the rendering rules / line disciplines / syntaxes of local vs remote PTY aren't guaranteed to match (especially if the local PTY is actually a real physical TTY); and so in practice, clients doing PTY replication like this actually have their own translation function — logic that acts as a hybrid of a rendering agent and a replay stream-conversion function, taking the byte-stream from the remote, reducing it into a model of immediate state-change effects, and then re-serializing those immediate state-change effects as a byte-stream that the local PTY/TTY will understand. (With the first half of this usually being app-specific code, and the second half of this usually being done using some version of libcurses, to know exactly what rendering-rule syntax the local PTY/TTY claims to understand.)

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Given all that, you could generalize a TTY/PTY to something other than "text". I've often myself considered a PTY where the "lines" are each (a binary, minimal encoding of) HTML body markup; or even where the "lines" are JSON-encoded log events with parent-node-IDs, and the "rendering" is of a default-collapsed hierarchical event history.

But you'd be losing a lot if you didn't bring across the concept of there being a message-stream + a "canvas" + a brush-state for that "canvas" + rules for two-way conversion between the message-stream and "canvas." Without the stateful canvas, you would need an unlimited-size transcript — and potentially hours of replay — to be able to "attach" a client to an existing backing PTY.

srcreigh• 2 years ago

is it just me, or is the Spotlights effect in a league of its own here?

Kudos to the author!

emmelaich4• 2 years ago

Does this have some overlap with libcaca? cacademo and cacafire are especially impressive. Also has Python bindings.

https://github.com/cacalabs/libcaca/tree/main

[edit, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib]

cdchn2• 2 years ago

Serious lack of screenshots here.

emmelaich4• 2 years ago

There's quite a few around the web.

Or just do `apt-get|dnf install caca-utils`

est• 2 years ago

That's so cool, I wonder if this can be pulled off on web pages? Non fixed width font would fail all over the places with quirks of css.

cdchn2• 2 years ago

I'm dying for a menu system like this that lets me select items old school BBS "light bar" style.

ein0p• 2 years ago

I did not expect this much variety and sophistication.

epiccoleman• 2 years ago

Absolutely awesome, I've gotta figure out a use for this!

booleanbetrayal• 2 years ago

As a former ASCII / ANSI artist, I wish this thing existed like 20 years ago and could make exportable animations for all my BBS needs. Can't wait to tinker!

CGamesPlay• 2 years ago

Would be cute to integrate this with streaming output, so I could tail a log file and have it appear like this (or stream an LLM output, maybe).

zoom6628• 2 years ago

Gorgeous and brilliant. Hats off to the developer.

AnonC• 2 years ago

I had a broad smile on my face while going through the effects. This is so playful and fantastic!

The fact that it comes with a command line tool makes it a lot more useful to play with. I can imagine this being used for short pieces of text and to make “hacker” scenes for others.

Now I want an ASCII Art generator built into this! :)

maxglute• 2 years ago

Incredible. Is there site that collects different ascii art techniques?

chauhankiran• 2 years ago

Movie material!

capitol_• 2 years ago

I would love to have these effects as an option when viewing man pages.

thunkle• 2 years ago

I feel like a good use case for this would be on an oldskool roguelike.

Pwntheon• 2 years ago

Cogmind is a newer roguelike that uses lots of effects like this. It looks amazing

sph• 2 years ago

Also brogue tends to have very fancy ASCII art animation. Cogmind is not strictly ASCII per se.

vanderZwan2• 2 years ago

It also has one of the best user-interfaces of a text-based roguelike ever. And when I say "interface" I don't just mean the graphic design, although that's amazing too.

hereme888• 2 years ago

Can't think of a more HackerNews worthy project.

vim-guru• 2 years ago

Wow! I did that Matrix-effect once in C#/mono. It turned out to be way more complicated than I initially thought. Well done!

giamma• 2 years ago

One of the killer features of terminal for me is that it's always clean and polished without fancy animations. You can possibly use transparency but that's more than a visual effect, it can actually be useful to let you see what's happening in a background window.

So while technically amazing, I do hope these text effects will never land in real world application, unless it's related to video gaming.

mrjin• 2 years ago

Oh dear, why would any terminal user want that?

joveian• 2 years ago

That was my first thought seeing the headline, but they are really clever. My first thought looking through the examples was that I wouldn't mind a progress bar that uses the swarm effect.

https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/img/effect...

abelcha• 2 years ago

Im really impressed how snappy it is, i played with it localy a bit cause you never know how the screencast was made etc; I can confirm this looks just as good as the video, well done

cpill• 2 years ago

I'll be looking for this in Hollywood movies

_bax• 2 years ago

Wonderful !

ivanjermakov• 2 years ago

Reminds me a lot of Cogmind's[1] level entry visuals, love it!

[1] https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

busfahrer• 2 years ago

Reminds me of notcurses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4lmMADP1lA

Mind you, this rendered entirely in a terminal. You can try it yourself on most systems by installing notcurses and then running `notcurses-demo`.

tokai• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Caves of Qud.

NoGravitas• 2 years ago

I love terminals, but I have to say, I kind of hate this sort of thing? Where you need at least 256 colors, GPU acceleration, and 240 columns x 80 lines? At that point it's just a curiosity, anywhere you could do that in a terminal you could do it easier and better in a graphical window. I want my terminal apps to actually still work in an 80x24 monochrome VT220 at 19200 baud. I want them to use termcap instead of hardcoding xterm's extensions to ANSI.

barbs• 2 years ago

I wonder if there is a similar, more lightweight library that has cool effects that work with the minimum specs you've specified?

outworlder• 2 years ago

AAlib can probably be used for that, although it doesn't have those text effects coded.

The demo, BB, should be more like it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ukhOAUseKY

AAlib, as far as I know, works in VT220.

adhambadr• 2 years ago

omg I'll finally look as cool as my parents think I am when I'm pinging google.com to know how bad the wifi is.

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

These are really cool, and I wish I could have used them when I ran a dial-up BBS. (Although I don't know if 14.4k or 28.8k were fast enough to handle these.)

But, if you're going to go through the trouble to use these in a command-line program, why not make a GUI?

anamexis• 2 years ago

But, if you're going to go through the trouble to use these in a command-line program, why not make a GUI?

Because this is more fun.

bux93• 2 years ago

I look forward to seeing this in future movies and forensic procedurals. "The hacker left a virus in the mainframe!"

stackedinserter2• 2 years ago

That's nice, but can we add a feature to terminals that actually understands what it shows and can post-process/augment the data? E.g. when `curl -v` dumped 10k json, the terminal would be able to prettify it right in the terminal. When there's an output with seemingly table data, it would be able to show it as a table with sorting, aggregations and export functionality. If it's code, do some syntax. Logs? - collapse long lines and highlight the parts of them.

dvqc• 2 years ago

I believe what you're looking for is Jq for the json prettifying/manipulation, and nushell for tabular text (not sure about that one, I've only seen it mentioned occasionally). I strongly believe this should not become the job of the terminal, as it makes it all the more complicated and would possibly deter people from writing the kind of specialized, portable tools that are Jq and nushell for instance. At most, I think it should be a job for an ncurses application

stackedinserter2• 2 years ago

Everyone is free to not use this feature when it eventually implemented in terminals. Just like syntax highlighting, code completion and AI copilots.

The thing is that as a heavy user I do use jq, terminal triggers and my own stdout colouring/parsing apps that e.g. highlight and parse timestamps or numbers. It all kinda works via endless Cmd+C, "pbpaste | jq" etc but it feels wasteful.

I want to interact with what terminal shows me, not just look at it and copy/paste with broken formatting to somewhere else.

bubblebeard• 2 years ago

I’ve no idea what I would really use this for, and yet it’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. My eyes are forever improved from having seen this.

ljm• 2 years ago

As soon as the VHS effect goes out of fashion in PS1 style indie horror games, the community will move on to C64 style cassette loading sequences… on steroids.

nextaccountic• 2 years ago

Maybe you would use if you were filming a hacker movie? Or something like that

jaimehrubiks• 2 years ago

Just applied to /etc/profile.d/ to all SSH servers in my team. I also added some conditionals so that it only runs on interactive shells, doesn't run in sudo -i or tmux/screen, and it only runs once per day per server.

indoorcomic• 2 years ago

I miss when the internet was full of whimsical stuff like this. Great library, thanks for sharing!

swayvil• 2 years ago

This is so darn cool. Better than 99% of modern computer art. Really says something about good graphic design.

anthonypz• 2 years ago

Amazing. I’ve seen similar effects used in production on https://musicforprogramming.net/ which looks like the RandomSequence effect.

TTE: Terminal Text Effects

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