Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Bash Screensavers

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 82 posts

Re: Show HN: Bash Screensavers

#31

Post by adzm »

hk1337 wrote: post #27

This reminds me of having a screensaver in DOS.

I thought the same thing. I remember being in elementary school and seeing one of these terminate-and-stay-resident / TSR joke things that made the smiley face ascii character bounce around the screen. That led me to finally move on from Pascal and dive into C to make one of my own, though I'm pretty sure it would be possible in Pascal, all the (very obscure) information I could find as a child used C examples. When I finally had one running that would "Moo!" at random places I felt like a real hacker.

Re: Show HN: Bash Screensavers

#35

Post by PessimalDecimal »

blenderob wrote: post #26
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #25

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.

Wow! The copyright of zone.el goes back to 2000. But this is the first time I hear about it! How did you find this gem?

It got mentioned briefly in an article in Mickey Petersen's excellent Mastering Emacs blog.

Re: Show HN: Bash Screensavers

#37

Post by _def »

unfortunately quite inefficient, I'm sure higher framerates must be possible

(at least when running in docker, maybe that's the bottleneck, but I hesitated to run this on my machine directly)

Re: Show HN: Bash Screensavers

#38

Post by imiric »

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.

Re: Show HN: Bash Screensavers

#40

Post by imiric »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #3

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 :))

Ah, sweet!

Do you know if this supports any DE (or no DE)? Or is it strictly for KDE Plasma?

Post reply on HN