Show HN: Bash Screensavers

(github.com)

177 points | by attogram 9 hours ago

26 comments

  • throwaway2037 6 hours ago
    How can anyone have a bad day when great projects like this pop up on the front page of HN?

    Did you see the library of viz? https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/blob/main/libr...

    My favourite API: lov_die_with_honor()

  • jsmailes 5 hours ago
    I like how all the tests seem to be contained within a "jury" folder which judges the merit of your code, made me smile - It's always nice for open-source/FOSS projects to retain a bit of whimsy and joy.
  • attogram 9 hours ago
    • izabera 6 hours ago
      they're generally pretty but they should really hide the cursor, it looks offputting in basically all cases
      • attogram 5 hours ago
        Agreed! Known bug that will get squashed...
  • dorianmariecom 34 minutes ago
    a simple one:

        #!/usr/bin/env bash
    
        _cleanup_and_exit() {
          tput cnorm
          tput sgr0
          clear
          exit 0
        }
    
        trap _cleanup_and_exit SIGINT
    
        while true; do
          width=$(tput cols)
          height=$(tput lines)
    
          tput setab 0
          clear
          tput civis
    
          x=$((RANDOM % width + 1))
          y=$((RANDOM % height + 1))
          color_code=$((RANDOM % 256))
    
          printf "\e[${y};${x}H\e[38;5;${color_code}m"
    
          sleep 1
        done
  • seba_dos1 9 hours ago
    You can put them onto your Plasma wallpaper and/or lockscreen background with plasma-wallpaper-application: https://invent.kde.org/dos/plasma-wallpaper-application

    (thought I'd share that since its raison d'être was to put Asciiquarium there :))

    • zahlman 2 hours ago
      Nice. This makes them actual screensavers in my view as opposed to just animations. (Not that screens require "saving" any more, but still.)
      • messe 1 hour ago
        > Not that screens require "saving" any more, but still.

        OLEDs can still suffer from burn-in, but it's also just easier to have them... turn off...

    • imiric 5 hours ago
      Ah, sweet!

      Do you know if this supports any DE (or no DE)? Or is it strictly for KDE Plasma?

      • seba_dos1 5 hours ago
        Plasma wallpaper plugins are, well, for Plasma.

        When it comes to wallpapers, you could do a similar trick on X11 DEs by putting it onto the root window (with a tool like xwinwrap) and on Wayland DEs that support layer-shell (with a tool like windowtolayer). I'm not aware of screen lockers that do something like that, but you could always write your own one.

        • imiric 4 hours ago
          Right, but I hoped it would work as a standalone Qt app.

          Yeah, I've used xwinwrap before, but am lost on Wayland. I'll look into windowtolayer, thanks. I'd rather not have to write this myself...

  • PessimalDecimal 7 hours ago
    I've used Emacs for years but just recently learned about zone.el. I wonder if this is based on it too. I see some of the same screensavers here.
    • blenderob 7 hours ago
      Wow! The copyright of zone.el goes back to 2000. But this is the first time I hear about it! How did you find this gem?
      • PessimalDecimal 6 hours ago
        It got mentioned briefly in an article in Mickey Petersen's excellent Mastering Emacs blog.
      • LukeShu 5 hours ago
        I know the trendy thing is to hide the menu-bar, but it's great for discoverability. Tools→Games→Zone Out
  • Agingcoder 20 minutes ago
    Why bother with Xwindow when you can have this ?
  • dakinitribe 47 minutes ago
    Never a nice surprise when I find rm -rf / --no-preserve-root in a public repo, apart from this time!

    Also, found one of the easter eggs!

  • LeoPanthera 1 hour ago
    Of course, if used as an actual screensaver on a phosphor or plasma based screen, eventually the character grid would be burned into your screen.

    A lot of screensavers, even historically, forget the original purpose of what "saving" your screen means.

  • lucideer 3 hours ago
    Nice!

    First feature request: allow disabling all the `tput setab 0` calls throughout the codebase. This may make screensavers look weird on white terminals but should improve them for anyone using non-black-but-dark terminal themes.

  • culebron21 3 hours ago
    In the good ol' days, ~1990, Norton Commander had a screensaver with stars, similar to the one in the gallery readme, but with fewer stars, that grew from a dot to bigger dot, to shining, then bursted. Nice to see something like that again.
  • huhtenberg 8 hours ago
    For the 'life' screensaver it might make sense to use half blocks as a base rendering unit. ASCII 220 and 223.
  • nickstinemates 5 hours ago
    You can also experiment and make your own[1] using TerminalTextEffects[2]. I added this to my ~/.zshrc

        > /home/keeb/code/projects/login/motd.sh
    
    Which has..

        #!/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
    
    Change motd to have an ascii art of your choice. Run it in a loop if you want :)

    1: https://keeb.dev/static/login.mp4 2: https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects

  • skeptrune 5 hours ago
    I love seeing projects like this on the front page. They are so fun and can be little small tricks that improve your quality of life drastically.
  • rkapsoro 2 hours ago
    fwiw I've noticed that Omarchy[1] uses some terminal-based screensavers, using something called tte[2] to do so.

    1: https://omarchy.org/

    2: https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects

  • corranh 5 hours ago
    Very cool! Reminds me of the various 90s movie pretend hacker typing screensavers like Neo-HackerTyper.
  • Evidlo 8 hours ago
    Why does the cursor flicker around the screen for most of these? Does it have something to do with not double buffering the display?
    • attogram 8 hours ago
      Some artifact from asciinema maybe. Only shows up in the preview gifs. Needs to be fixed!
  • LocoPadre 7 hours ago
    Recommendation: Use the terminal control codes 1049h and 1049l [1][2] to keep the terminal 'clean'.

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Control_Seque...

    [2]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/789031

  • panki27 6 hours ago
    For tmux users: you can use the lock-command option with something like cmatrix for a quick and dirty screensaver.
  • hk1337 7 hours ago
    This reminds me of having a screensaver in DOS.
    • adzm 6 hours ago
      I thought the same thing. I remember being in elementary school and seeing one of these terminate-and-stay-resident / TSR joke things that made the smiley face ascii character bounce around the screen. That led me to finally move on from Pascal and dive into C to make one of my own, though I'm pretty sure it would be possible in Pascal, all the (very obscure) information I could find as a child used C examples. When I finally had one running that would "Moo!" at random places I felt like a real hacker.
    • alka47 6 hours ago
      [dead]
  • FergusArgyll 9 hours ago
    Cool

    What are those commit messages?

    • warp 8 hours ago
      Looks like an attempt to make the main GitHub page (the part above the README) display something interesting. It is messed up now because of further commits, but you can see what it looked like at the time here:

      https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/tree/a7369a93c...

    • attogram 8 hours ago
      See the spread-the-word script in https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/tree/main/spot... This script generates a series of shell commands to create a "spotlight" message on the main GitHub repository page. It does this by generating commands that make trivial changes to the top 12 files and directories and then commit those changes with custom messages.
    • seba_dos1 9 hours ago
      Protip for the author: --allow-empty ;P
      • kevincox 8 hours ago
        But that doesn't change the files, so it won't show up in the tree view as the user is trying to accomplish.
      • xxs 8 hours ago
        instead of --amend?
        • seba_dos1 8 hours ago
          Instead of adding or removing a space in random files when making cute and useless commit logs.
          • xxs 8 hours ago
            that's what I meant - "amend" would not create any extra commits/entries
            • seba_dos1 8 hours ago
              ...which is not a helpful advice when what they clearly wanted is to create a bunch of extra commits.
    • madsohm 8 hours ago
      AI slop - or worse, somebody trying to hide something.
  • _def 6 hours ago
    unfortunately quite inefficient, I'm sure higher framerates must be possible

    (at least when running in docker, maybe that's the bottleneck, but I hesitated to run this on my machine directly)

  • alejoar 8 hours ago
    Doesn't work for me on MacOS:

    I get "mapfile: command not found"

    • hinkley 2 hours ago
      IIRC macOS is at least one major version behind in bash.
      • dylan604 47 minutes ago
        something something licensing something something

        new installs default to bash not being the default terminal. someone else mentioned macports, but there's a new version available via brew as well

    • doodpants 6 hours ago
      After installing bash via MacPorts, it works for me. All except #3 cutesaver, which gives an infinite loop of:

        cutesaver.sh: line 55: shuf: command not found
      • seba_dos1 5 hours ago
        shuf has been a part of coreutils since 2006.
    • 30minAdayHN 6 hours ago
      I encountered this in another project. This should hopefully fix it:

      zmodload zsh/mapfile

    • SeeManDo 8 hours ago
      Same here
      • SeeManDo 8 hours ago
        Bash Screensavers v0.0.27 (Mystic Shine)

        ./screensaver.sh: line 79: mapfile: command not found 1 .

        (Press ^C to exit)

        Choose your screensaver: 1 404 Screensaver Not Found:

        Oh no! Screensaver had trouble! Error code: 1

        • seba_dos1 8 hours ago
          Get a Bash that's not ancient. mapfile is there since version 4.0 from 2009.
        • SeeManDo 8 hours ago
          Seems to be a old version of bash installed and used by default on macos
          • SeeManDo 8 hours ago
            Even after updating still getting the same error

            checked active bash version:

            echo $BASH_VERSION

            5.3.3(1)-release

            • seba_dos1 7 hours ago
              What's relevant is whether "/usr/bin/env bash" runs the correct one.
              • kridsdale3 44 minutes ago
                I used "brew install bash && brew info bash" to get the path, then ran that shell (zsh doesn't work), then inside that new bash, ran the screensaver app.

                I found the 4k fullscreen perf in iTerm2 to be not-great, so I did it again in the kitty (GPU powered) terminal macos app, and it was good.

  • ratelimitsteve 1 hour ago
    ive always wanted to build something like this for divination, an X by Y field in which each cell is randomly assigned a character from a set which refreshes on a tick that you're meant to just gaze on and look for spontaneous patterns in, maybe with some conway game of life style rules about how cells can be more or less likely to update based on the states of their neighbors. Fork incoming.
  • imiric 6 hours ago
    Nice! I won't use this since screensavers are much more interesting when not limited to characters, but this is a neat project.

    Screensavers are a lost art. I still enjoy them, but at some point we just gave up on them. In the era of CRTs they had a practical purpose (they're screen savers, after all), but modern OLED displays also suffer from burn-in for which screensavers would be useful. My enjoyment is purely aesthetic, though. Sometimes I just want to have something pleasing to glance at in the background, instead of a black screen.

    Nowadays most operating systems and desktop environments don't even support them. The state of the art on Linux still seems to be `xscreensaver`, which does have many great ones, but the collection is static, and most of it is visually stuck in the 90s. I wouldn't even try getting it to run on Wayland, and when I last looked into it, it required some hacks and 3rd-party tools.

    Also, I've always found the feature of screen locking and screen saving to be orthogonal. Often I want to see pretty graphics without locking my screen, and viceversa.