GitHub - denisepattenson/perlin-terminal: Beautiful Perlin noise animation for your terminal

perlin-terminal

Beautiful Perlin noise animation for your terminal. Smooth, flowing gradients rendered in 24-bit truecolor using half-block characters for double vertical resolution.

Features

Truecolor rendering — Full 24-bit RGB color gradients
Double vertical resolution — Uses ▀ half-block characters to render 2 pixels per cell
Multiple color themes — Ocean, Fire, Aurora, Matrix
Smooth animation — Multi-octave Perlin noise for organic, flowing motion
60 FPS — Optimized for smooth rendering
Responsive — Handles terminal resize gracefully
Clean exit — Ctrl+C / Q / Esc restores terminal state

Install

cargo install --git https://github.com/denisepattenson/perlin-terminal

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/denisepattenson/perlin-terminal
cd perlin-terminal
cargo build --release
./target/release/perlin-terminal

Usage

# Default ocean theme
perlin-terminal

# Fire theme
perlin-terminal --theme fire

# Aurora borealis
perlin-terminal --theme aurora

# Matrix-style green
perlin-terminal --theme matrix

# Customize noise and speed
perlin-terminal --theme fire --scale 0.04 --speed 0.8

Options

Flag	Default	Description
`-t, --theme`	`ocean`	Color theme: `ocean`, `fire`, `aurora`, `matrix`
`-s, --scale`	`0.06`	Noise scale (smaller = more zoomed in)
`--speed`	`0.4`	Animation speed multiplier
`--fps`	`60`	Target frames per second
`--seed`	`42`	Perlin noise seed

Controls

Q or Esc — Quit
Ctrl+C — Quit

Themes

🌊 Ocean

Deep navy → royal blue → teal → cyan. Calm and mesmerizing.

🔥 Fire

Black → deep red → orange → yellow → white. Like staring into embers.

🌌 Aurora

Purple → teal → green → pink. Northern lights in your terminal.

💚 Matrix

Black → dark green → bright green. You know the one.

Requirements

A terminal with 24-bit truecolor support (most modern terminals)
Rust 1.70+

License

MIT