Let it snow in your terminal

Wow, surprising to see this on the frontpage this morning! This is my old script, the better one to use is called snowmachine:<p><pre><code> * https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sontek&#x2F;snowmachine * https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;snowmachine&#x2F; </code></pre> Which is also on docker, homebrew, nix, etc. It probably makes sense to update the post to link to one of these since they&#x27;ll provide a better experience

I&#x27;m running ubuntu 23.10 and was pleased to see that xsnow (apt install xsnow) has been updated and &quot;just works&quot;. A nice update on xsnow from decades back, but there&#x27;s a vintage mode for the nostalgic.<p>The new xsnow added stars, aurora, birds, moon, stars, wind, blowing snow, moose, meteors, reindeer, snow that builds up slowly (the flakes compress) etc. Sadly snow builds up on the settings window, but with weyland it doesn&#x27;t build up on normal windows.

Python? We don&#x27;t need no stinkin&#x27; Python.<p><pre><code> while sleep 0.1; do printf &quot;%-$(( ( RANDOM % `tput cols` ) - 1))s\e[0;$(( 30 + ($RANDOM % 8) ))m*\n&quot; ; done</code></pre>

&gt; You can pass –stack if you want the snow to pile up<p>The flag is --stack of course (I checked), but somewhere a <i>helpful</i> formatting engine replaced two hyphens with an en dash.

Hilariously old-school. Even the name, <i>snowjob</i>, feels wonderfully anachronistic in 2023.<p>Definitely getting TRS-80, Robert Frost (1) vibes from this one.<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;j-Zcog5o_p0?t=10" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;j-Zcog5o_p0?t=10</a>

<p><pre><code> cat &#x2F;dev&#x2F;random | tr -c &#x27;ox0.@&#x27; &#x27; &#x27; </code></pre> (poor man&#x27;s version)

&gt; ruby -e &#x27;C=`stty size`.scan(&#x2F;\d+&#x2F;)[1].to_i;S=[&quot;2743&quot;.to_i(16)].pack(&quot;U*&quot;);a={};puts &quot;\033[2J&quot;;loop{a[rand(C)]=0;a.each{|x,o|;a[x]+=1;print &quot;\033[#{o};#{x}H \033[#{a[x]};#{x}H#{S} \033[0;0H&quot;};$stdout.flush;sleep 0.1}&#x27;

It&#x27;s impressive that this can be done in a few lines of bash:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;sontek&#x2F;1505483" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;sontek&#x2F;1505483</a>

There use to be a tiny software at the time of windows XP. It created a falling snow effect on your screen (they were just tiny white pixels as i remember) which collected on sharp edges including icons, taskbar and text and accumulate over time. It would disappear when a window was moved. Anyone remember its name?

Didn&#x27;t work in zsh on my Mac. Fixed the issues and added a couple of effects:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lasanthak&#x2F;snowjob&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;snowjob.sh">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lasanthak&#x2F;snowjob&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;snowjob.sh</a>

You can have a roaring fire in another tty:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dmo9000&#x2F;ttyfire">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dmo9000&#x2F;ttyfire</a>

An unrelated version of snow on the ASCII playground (runs in the browser, interactive):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.ertdfgcvb.xyz&#x2F;#&#x2F;1640473937099" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.ertdfgcvb.xyz&#x2F;#&#x2F;1640473937099</a>

Going to try this in my pfsense console because I am a bad admin.

Snowing on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mullvad.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mullvad.net&#x2F;</a>

Screen captures?

This is awesome...cmatrix is a similar program I like based on The Matrix, available on homebrew

Me in Brazil letting it snow on my terminal while it&#x27;s currently 100°F

snowjob, haha. Reminds me of the notorious pronview flamewar on debian-devel. Nice to see that language police hasn&#x27;t fully overtaken FLOSS yet.