fractty

An interactive Mandelbrot set explorer for your teletype terminal. Or more likely pseudo-TTY.

Why

1. Terminals are cool, and we need to teach them new tricks.
2. Fractals are beautiful and I'd like to understand them better.
3. Practice.

Thanks & Inspiration

• Benoit Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010)
• gdamore/tcell for the excellent terminal library
• 12-minute Mandelbrot: fractals on a 50 year old IBM 1401 mainframe

Usage

Use the z and x keys to zoom in and out. Use arrow keys for navigation and q to quit. The mouse wheel zooms, but panning around using click-and-drag is currently broken.

Gallery

FAQ

It looks kind of low-resolution and crappy

• Thanks! That's not a question though. The resolution is limited
  to the number of columns on the terminal and twice the number of rows. Vertical resolution is doubled by using the half-block character "▄" (U+2584), so an old-school 80 column, 24 row terminal window is effectively a measely 80x48 pixels. You can increase the resolution by shrinking the font in the terminal window.

Why is it slow weird and broken

• I only barely know what I'm doing!