Great work!

[vaskark]

Great work, shr00mie.
A few suggestions:

• Colors like red,green, etc. should use the current ANSI versions
• Space (padding) around the message text (if desired)
• Doesn't the original cmatrix come with matrix.psfu.gz or matrix.fnt? Can we use those for Japanese characters so that we don't have to change our preferred terminal font to DejaVuSansMono?

Just a thought. Once again, many thanks.

[shr00mie]

1. i assume you mean ansi names. low priority. i'll add some sort of color chart with names in their corresponding colors.

2. nope. ugly.

3. the reason none of it worked before, or rather one of the multitude of reasons, is because the term is configured with a font for the session. and...well...here's the rendered glyph output for the mtx font:

in case you were wondering why you were getting rectangles.

then there's matrix-code, which is plagued by the same issues.

not to mention font configurations and properties such as uniform character advance, fixed pitch, panose font flag, os/2 version, fsSelect bit, fsType bit...

to get cmatrix AND your standard terminal activities working simultaneously, the matrix glyphs have to reside in a font that conforms to monospace spec, with all necessary metadata and configuration bits, making it as universally compatible as humanly possible.

to get this working, i found two more aesthetically pleasing matrix fonts, deduped and consolidated the best looking glyphs from those into the source glyph set, split that into symbols, numbers, and alpha characters, normalized those individual sets, then patched everything into the parent monospace spec font, matched advance, with the digital rain effect being generated from the following set of glyphs:

every monospace font is slightly different in regards to advance, weight, etc. i suppose it's theoretically possible to create a universal installer that checks the default font for the terminal of the host os, match advance, weight, scale of glyphs to match the current user terminal font, introduce logic to avoid unicode and pua overlaps, and then patch the matrix glyphs into the default system font...that's a level of effort i'm not currently inclined to invest, especially when all i wanted to do was get this working and updated for modern environments.

at this point, it's working on ubuntu, i'll push the macos component sometime this week, wrote a powershell script to get it working on windows10/11 with PuTTY so you can connect from windows to a linux/macos box with cmatrix installed and still have all the glyphs and colors render properly, which covers the three major OSs, if you squint.