a12n / rematrix

Digital rain in X Window System root window

Description

A rewrite of glmatrix from xscreensaver with distance field font rendering and color customizations.

It renders to X server root window, and may be used as a live desktop wallpaper in window managers like DWM.

As original glmatrix it has the following modes: matrix, binary, decimal, DNA, hexadecimal:

Colors may be customized:

Usage

There are the following command line parameters handled:

• -c color — color of characters in a strip.
• -f color — color of the feeder character at the bottom of each strip.
• -l color — background color.
• -m mode — character encoding. The following modes are supported: binary or bin, dna, decimal or dec, hexadecimal or hex, matrix.
• -o — enable fog effect. If enabled, strips which are farther from the screen will look darker.
• -w — disable brightness waves effect. If enabled, brightness of characters in a strip changes in waves from top to bottom.
• -r rate — limit frame rate. rematrix will try to present a frame rate times per second and will sleep between frames.

All colors are in #RRGGBB format.

rematrix handles SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 signals. It will pause rendering on receiving SIGUSR1 and resume on receiving SIGUSR2.

Dependencies

Build

You will need the following at build time:

• CMake
• C++17 compiler
• libX11
• GLEW
• Python3 with Python Imaging Library

In Debian the dependencies may be installed from the following packages:

cmake g++ libglew-dev libx11-dev python3-pil

Create directory for build files, configure, build and run:

cd rematrix
mkdir _build
cd _build
cmake ..
make
./rematrix

Runtime

Support of modern OpenGL (version 3.0 or higher) is required in graphics hardware and drivers.

Issues

Original glmatrix has view rotations, which are missing in rematrix for now.

It would probably look better with a bloom effect added (either as a post-processing effect or somehow backed into font texture). The effect should be customizable with command line parameters.