A psychedelic Mandelbrot set visualizer plugin for cliamp, the terminal music player.
cliamp plugins install mikkel-bergmann/cliamp-mandelbrotStart cliamp and press v to cycle through the visualizers until Mandelbrot appears.
cliamp plugins remove mandelbrot- Continuous zoom into four classic Mandelbrot locations (Sea Horse Valley, Elephant Valley, Seahorse spiral arm, Antenna mini-brot), cycling automatically when the interior fills the screen
- Slow rotation — the view gently rotates as it zooms, revealing new structure on every pass
- Bass reactivity — sub-bass and kick frequencies pulse the color palette; strong hits flash the interior bright
- Unicode braille rendering — every terminal cell is a braille character (U+2800–U+28FF); escape-time iteration count maps to dot density (0–8 dots), giving smooth halftone anti-aliasing with no resolution loss
- Checkerboard dithering — adjacent cells alternate between fill level N and N+1, doubling effective density levels to ~15 for smoother gradients
- Period-coloured interior — Brent cycle detection captures the orbit period of each interior point; main cardioid, period-2 bulb, period-4 spirals etc. each get a distinct cycling hue
- 30-colour psychedelic palette — ANSI 256-colour cycling through red → orange → yellow → green → cyan → blue → magenta and back
- Silence detection — animation freezes when no audio is playing and resumes instantly
The renderer is optimised for Lua 5.1's sandboxed environment:
| Technique | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Cardioid / period-2 bulb pre-check | Skips iteration for ~50–70% of interior cells |
| Incremental coordinate stepping | 2 adds per cell instead of 4 multiplications |
| Two-phase Brent cycle detection | Interior exits early; exterior escapes fast |
| Per-frame braille lookup tables | Single indexed read per cell; no hot-path allocation |
Constants at the top of mandelbrot.lua:
| Constant | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
ZOOM_SPEED |
0.12 |
How fast the view zooms in |
ROTATION_SPEED |
0.004 |
Degrees of rotation per second |
BASE_ITER |
80 |
Minimum iteration depth |
MAX_ITER_CAP |
128 |
Maximum iteration depth at deep zoom |
BASS_FLASH_THR |
0.55 |
Band level that triggers a colour flash |
COLOR_FLOW |
2.0 |
Speed of palette cycling |
SOLID_TRIGGER |
0.99 |
Interior fill fraction that triggers a zoom reset |