zmatrix

zmatrix is a (partial) clone of the popular cmatrix program written purely in Zig. It's currently just a project for me to learn Zig as a language, but feel free to contribute any ideas/code.

Capabilities

zmatrix can replicate all core functionality of cmatrix.

This includes the basic premise (characters falling down a terminal) as well as changing the color of the characters

zmatrix has support for the following flags (some inherited from cmatrix, others are original):

• a: Asynchronous scroll - columns of characters move at different speeds
• b: Bold - characters can be in bold
• B: All bold - all characters are bold
• C [color]: set the desired character color
• g [color]: set the desired background color.
  • If no option is provided, the background will be the terminal's black color
  • This option is provided since zmatrix does not set a background color by default, unlike newer builds of cmatrix.
• h: Help - print this help message
• r: rainbow: random colors for each character
  • Note: unlike cmatrix's rainbow mode, the color of a character does not change

Building zmatrix

zmatrix is a purely Zig project, so the only thing you need to install is the Zig compiler (downloads here).

Once installed, all you need to do is clone the repo (or download an extract an archive) and run zig build to compile zmatrix for your system. Alternatively, you can run zig build run to compile and immediately run zmatrix.

On first build, you will need an internet connection so the compiler can fetch the dependencies (see below).

Dependencies

zmatrix depends on:

• zig-termsize: a library for determining the terminal size regardless of platform. It's simple, but why reinvent the wheel.
• parg: "parg is a lightweight argument parser for Zig which focuses on a single task: Parsing command-line arguments into positional arguments and long/short flags" - parg README

Unlike cmatrix, zmatrix does not depend on ncurses. This was done for a few reasons, including

1. I don't know how to add ncurses as a dependency
2. Using ncurses would make compilation for different targets much harder
3. All I need for zmatrix is ANSI terminal codes, which can be set up rather easily