Screensavers are cool. Why can't you have them in your terminals?

There is a video demo available on YouTube.

Install

1. Copy terminal-screensaver.conf.example to ~/.terminal-screensaver.conf and modify as you wish.

2. In your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc, add a sourcing of the terminal-screensaver-include.sh file:

   screensaver_source=$HOME/Documents/terminal-screensaver/terminal-screensaver-include.sh
   [[ -s "$screensaver_source" ]] && source "$screensaver_source"
   

3. Put terminal-screensaver and terminal-screensaver-reset somewhere in your PATH.

4. Read the comments in terminal-screensaverd and run it.

Caveats

This is a toy, designed for fun more than serious use. The idea for it came while watching my coworker pretend to hack on our codebase while running cmatrix.

"Activity" is defined as commands run; this means that a screensaver might trigger while you're in the middle of typing a command. Thankfully, if you're in vim for long enough for it to trigger, the screensaver won't launch until you quit.

Since exiting the screensaver doesn't reset the counter, the polling mechanism will frequently trigger the screensaver again before you have a chance to do much of anything. This should hopefully be fixed soon, but if you have any clever ideas about this, please let me know.