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  • I've never seen a repo that invites AI coders and then tells them how to behave [0]. I imagine we'll see more of this in the future.

    [0] https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/blob/main/AGEN...

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 :))

  • 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()

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