neo
Simulate the digital rain from "The Matrix"
TLDR
Run the default Matrix rain animation
SYNOPSIS
neo [options]
DESCRIPTION
neo recreates the iconic digital rain effect from "The Matrix" films. Streams of random characters endlessly scroll down the terminal screen, closely mimicking the movie scene where Cypher explains the code to Neo. It imitates finer details such as the half-width katakana characters, uneven colors, glitching, and flickering.
The animation can be customized with different character sets, color palettes, scrolling speeds, and density settings. Interactive controls allow real-time adjustments using arrow keys for speed and glitch intensity, and number keys for color switching.
PARAMETERS
-c, --color color
Set foreground text color. Available: green, green2, green3, yellow, orange, red, blue, cyan, gold, rainbow, purple, pink, pink2, vaporwave, gray-S, --speed num
Set the scrolling speed-d, --density num
Control how many droplets appear onscreen (default: 1.0)--charset name
Character set to use: ascii, extended, english, dec, digits, punc, bin, hex, katakana, greek, cyrillic, arabic, hebrew, devanagari, braille, runic--chars range
Specify custom Unicode character ranges via hex codes--colormode mode
Color assignment method: 0 = random (default), 1 = gradient-m, --message text
Display centered ASCII text revealed as characters stream past-a, --async
Enable faster asynchronous scrolling-F, --fullwidth
Use fullwidth character rendering--noglitch
Disable glitch effects-h, --help
Display help information
CAVEATS
Performance depends on terminal emulator capabilities. A GPU-accelerated terminal significantly improves rendering. Unicode character sets require appropriate font support. Does not support native Windows; use WSL instead.
HISTORY
neo was created by st3w as a modern rewrite of CMatrix (originally by Chris Allegretta). It adds 32-bit color and full Unicode support, going beyond the original CMatrix capabilities. The project is available on Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.