fakesteak

You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

-- Cypher

Overview

My take at an implementation of the digital character rain as seen in "The Matrix".

Some things you might like about fakesteak:

• Small footprint (low on RAM and disk usage)
• Good performance (low on CPU usage)
• Looks pretty close to the original (fading, glitches)
• Basic customization via command line options
• No dependencies (not even ncurses)
• Clean, well commented code
• Public Domain

Some things that might rub you the wrong way:

• No Japanese characters (for simplicity's sake)
• Not cross-platform (no Win/Mac)

Successfully tested on Linux (urxvt, xterm, lxterm, uxterm), FreeBSD (st) and WSL2. Feedback on compatibility with your OS / distro / terminal is very welcome; you can open an issue to let me know.

Dependencies / Requirements

• Terminal that supports 256 colors (8 bit color mode)
• Requires TIOCGWINSZ to be supported (to query the terminal size)
• Requires Make for building

Package

fakesteak might also be available as a package:

Building / Running

You can just run make. After that, you should be able to run it from the bin directory:

make
./bin/fakesteak

Optionally, you can install fakesteak for all users and then run it from wherever:

make install
fakesteak

Usage

fakesteak [OPTIONS...]

Options:

• -b: use background color
• -d: drops ratio ([1..100], default is 10)
• -e: error ratio ([1..100], default is 2)
• -h: print help text and exit
• -r: seed for the random number generator
• -s: speed factor ([1..100], default is 10)
• -V: print version information and exit

The drops ratio determines the density of the matrix, while the error ratio influences the number of glitches in the matrix (randomly changing characters).

Changinge the colors

Changing the colors is possible, but requires editing and recompiling the source code. It is pretty simple though. First, open up src/fakestake.c and find lines 24 through 30:

#define COLOR_BG   "\x1b[48;5;0m"   // background color, if to be used
#define COLOR_FG_0 "\x1b[38;5;231m" // color for the drop
#define COLOR_FG_1 "\x1b[38;5;48m"  // color for first tail cell
#define COLOR_FG_2 "\x1b[38;5;41m"  // ...
#define COLOR_FG_3 "\x1b[38;5;35m"  // ...
#define COLOR_FG_4 "\x1b[38;5;29m"  // ...
#define COLOR_FG_5 "\x1b[38;5;238m" // color for the last tail cell

Then, find yourself an 8-bit ANSI color code chart, like the one on the Wikipedia page on ANSI escape codes.

Next, find yourself six similar colors that are supposed to make up the drops and their gradient trace. Note down their numbers and then, in the above code, replace the number between the last ; and the m, respectively. That is, replace 231, 48, 41, 35, 29 and 238 as you see fit. You can also change the background color, 0, which is going to be used if you use the -b command line argument.

Performance

Since the main focus of fakesteak is performance, I tried comparing it to other popular implementations. Note, however, that this comparison is inaccurate and unfair at best, mainly for the following reasons:

• All projects have different design goals, feature sets and visual fidelity
• The measurements are just rounded estimates aquired from top and smem -tk (PSS)

For example, fakesteak is *nix only and does not support Japanese Katakana characters, while most other projects are cross-platform and do have Kana support. Also, note how cxxmatrix, for example, focuses on visuals, rendering three layers of rain with a glow effect. See this reddit thread for further discussion.

All projects were run in a 1920 x 1080 px urxvt terminal with options that give somewhat similar visual results. At least the speed of the rain is almost exactly the same for all, but density and visual fidelity (Kanas, fading, glow, etc) do differ. See the "arguments" column below to see how I've ran each implementation.

*Note): cxxmatrix behaves a bit odd on my system. If the terminal window is visible, it uses about 13% CPU. If it isn't (for example, by switching to another workspace), the CPU load doubles.

Support

Related Projects

• cmatrix
• tmatrix
• unimatrix
• cxxmatrix
• rusty-rain
• neo