Bash Screensavers

Tired of your boring old terminal? Wish you could spice up your command line with some animated ASCII art? Well, you've come to the right place!

Welcome to Bash Screensavers, a collection of screensavers written entirely in bash.

Because who needs fancy graphics cards and complex rendering engines when you have echo, sleep, and a little bit of tput magic?

Get the party started

git clone https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers.git
cd bash-screensavers
./screensaver.sh

Bash Screensavers v0.0.13 (Mystic Matrix)

  1 . alpha        - random colorful pixels
  2 . bouncing     - bouncing 'O' madness
  3 . cutesaver    - an infinite loop of cuteness
  4 . fireworks    - elegant fireworks display
  5 . matrix       - the matrix has you
  6 . pipes        - an endless pipe maze
  7 . rain         - soothing, gentle rain
  8 . speaky       - dramatic talking screensaver
  9 . stars        - twinkling starfield simulation
  10. tunnel       - fly into the digital tunnel

(Press ^C to exit)

Choose your screensaver:

Join the Community

Have questions, ideas, or just want to chat? Join our Discord server!

Join our Discord!

Developers Guide

Contributing

We welcome contributions!

Feel free to fork the repo, create a new screensaver, fix a bug, make something better and submit a pull request.

Let's make the command line a more colorful place, one ASCII character at a time.

Create Your Own Screensaver

Got an idea for a cool ASCII animation? Want to contribute to the collection? It's easy!

The Easy Way (Generator)

You can use the built-in generator to create a new screensaver with all the boilerplate code you need. Just run:

./screensaver.sh --new my-awesome-screensaver

(You can also use -n instead of --new)

This will create a new directory gallery/my-awesome-screensaver with a starter my-awesome-screensaver.sh script and a config.sh file. All you have to do is edit the .sh file to add your animation logic!

The Hard Way (Manual)

1. Create a new directory for your screensaver inside the gallery directory. For example, gallery/my-awesome-screensaver.
2. Create a shell script inside your new directory with the same name as the directory, ending in .sh. For example, gallery/my-awesome-screensaver/my-awesome-screensaver.sh.
3. Write your masterpiece! Your script should:
   • Be executable (chmod +x your-script.sh).
   • Handle cleanup gracefully. Use trap to catch SIGINT (Ctrl+C) and restore the terminal to its normal state.
   • Be awesome.

That's it! The main screensaver.sh script will automatically detect your new creation.

Project Overview

• ./screensaver.sh is the main menu script
  • it shows a list of available screensavers
  • and prompts user to pick one to run.
• ./gallery is the gallery directory, where all screensavers are stored.
  • Each screensaver has its own directory inside ./gallery
    • The name of the directory is the name of the screensaver.
    • example: screensaver named 'foo' is in: ./gallery/foo
  • Each screensaver has a run script in format 'name.sh'
    • example: ./gallery/foo/foo.sh
  • Each screensaver has a config file with name, tagline, etc
    • example: ./gallery/foo/config.sh
• ./tests directory is the BATS test suite for this project
• ./.github directory is for GitHub Workflows for this project.

Project Structure

.
├─ screensaver.sh    # Where the ASCII magic begins
├─ LICENSE           # MIT Licensed, because all the cool kids are doing it
├─ README.md         # This file, isn't it pretty?
├─ gallery           # Welcome to the Gallery of Terminal Visualizations
│   ├─ name          # I'm a screensaver, and I have my own directory!
│   │   └─ name.sh   # I'm a screensaver, and I can run, run, run!
│   │   └─ config.sh # Psst... want some free metadata?
├─ tests             # I gotta BATSy idea, we should test this stuff
│   └─ tests.sh      # It can't be that bad, can it?
└─ .github           # GitHub magic lives here
    └─ workflows
        └─ create.release.for.tag.yml

Style Suggestions

• Indents SHOULD be whatever works for you
• Functions and variables SHOULD be in snake_case
• Super-duper important variables SHOULD be in SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE
• You MUST have fun
  • Why use boring function names like main() when start_the_visual_pleasure() is just a few more characters

Requirements

• Bash v3.2 for ./screensaver.sh
• Individual screensavers may use any Bash version that makes them happy
• All screensavers must die with honor
  • Gracefully handle ^C to clean up the terminal and exit 0
• All shell scripts must have execute permission: chmod +x *.sh

Codespaces

• whip up a Codespace from attogram/bash-screensavers for fun!

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Development Tools

tools/smile-for-the-camera.sh

This script is used to generate animated GIF previews for each screensaver. It uses asciinema to record a .cast file and agg to convert it to a .gif. The output files are saved in the gallery/<screensaver_name>/ directory.

Usage:

./tools/smile-for-the-camera.sh

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Made with ❤️ and a lot of bash.