Matrix Digital Rain

Introduction

From Wikipedia:

Matrix digital rain, or Matrix code, is the computer code featured in the Ghost in the Shell series and the Matrix series. The falling green code is a way of representing the activity of the simulated reality environment of the Matrix on screen by kinetic typography.

The classic green body with a white head.

The script has options to control the color of head, body, and background. Here it is blue body and red head.

This project demonstrates use of the curses module. I was inspired by Making the Matrix Screensaver in C on a PDP-11/83 and had also long wanted to learn how to write an application utilizing curses.

About Curses

• Colors are numbered, and start_color() initializes 8 basic colors when it activates color mode.
• Color pair 0 is hard-wired to white on black, and cannot be changed.
• Coordinates are always passed in the order y,x, and the top-left corner of a window is coordinate (0,0)
• Writing to lower right corner will move cursor to new and non-existing(!) line thus raising exception

Getting Started

The code needs Python 3.11 to run due to the type hints in te source code. I expect you can remove the type hint if you really want to run the code in an old installation.

Dependencies

There is no dependencies to run outside the standard installation.

You will need some dependencies to develop and test the application.

Installing

Executing

While developing you can use the Makefile

make run

or simply to run with default colors

python3 matrix_rain.py

or with whatever colors you might prefer

python3 matrix_rain.py -c blue -H red

Help

TODO

• Make screen into an object
• What to do with Microsoft Windows