Particle Life in the Terminal!

The particle-life command for creating beautiful simulations in the terminal.

If you don't know what Particle Life is, watch this video (showcase) and this video (detailed explanation).

Features

• interactive full-screen GUI with camera controls
• animate output in the console (without fullscreen)
• print output to stdout (allows for piping with other commands)
• save / load particle files (implementing the Particle File Format)
• save / load settings files

Installation

Chocolatey (Windows)

choco install particle-life-cli

apt (Linux)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tom-mohr/particle-life
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install particle-life-cli

Manual Download (Windows, Linux)

1. Visit the latest release page on GitHub.
2. Download the appropriate binary for your operating system:
   • For Windows, download particle-life.exe.
   • For Linux, download particle-life.

Note: If you want to have access to the particle-life command from anywhere in your system, you can add the folder containing the binary to your system's PATH environment variable. This will allow you to run particle-life from any location in the command line.

Usage

After installation, you can execute the particle-life command from a terminal:

particle-life

Press q to quit.

GUI Commands

Command
q	quit
<Space>	pause
i	show info UI
I	show debug UI
r <float><Enter>	set rmax
t <float><Enter>	set dt
z <float><Enter>	set zoom
zz	set zoom = 1.0 to fit smaller screen dim
Z	set zoom to fit larger screen dim
a <int>	set attraction mode
aa	apply current attraction mode
p <int>	set position mode
pp	apply current position mode
c <int>	set color mode
x <string><Enter>	set display symbols (ordered by particle density)
d	disable clearing of colors

Attraction Mode
1 (default)	random
2	snakes

Position Mode
1	uniform
2 (default)	centered
3	horizontal
4	spiral

Color Mode
0	black & white
1 (default)	color

CLI Options

All UI controls have a corresponding CLI option. To see all available options, run particle-life -h. For example, the "-p " option will set the position mode upon startup:

particle-life -p 4

This initializes particle position with a spiral, as if the user had pressed p, followed by 4:

         8O.
     oOo:  oo:o
   :O.         OO
   @            ::
   0.     @      .
    @0   @@
      0o8:

Instead of having the interactive GUI open, you can also simply print the output to stdout with the -o flag. Use -O instead if you want the frame to be rendered in-place in the terminal, but still in stdtout.

If you only want the program to display a single frame and then quit, add the -q flag. This allows you to do something like this:

C:\users\tom> particle-life -oq | tee frame.txt

This will write the first rendered frame into a new file frame.txt.

If no -z <float> option is given, the zoom is set to fit the larger screen dimension, as if the user had pressed Z.

Build

Build executable:

./build

Run executable:

dist/linux/particle-life

or, on Windows:

dist/windows/particle-life

Notes:

• To build on unix, make sure that ncurses is installed. E.g. on Ubuntu like this:

  sudo apt-get install libncurses-dev

  This uses gcc to compile the C-code and links it with ncurses (using the -lncurses option). Unlike on Windows, getopt should be implicitly available.
• On Windows, the build uses gcc to compile the C-code and links it with pdcurses and getopt, since both these libraries are not being shipped with Windows. They are therefore included in the source code, i.e. you don't have to do anything except run the build script. I'm using this implementation of getopt for Windows: Chunde/getopt-for-windows.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!
For feature requests and bug reports create an issue in the issues page.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Contact

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions or suggestions:

• Twitter