Show HN: Bash Screensavers
24 comments
·October 28, 2025PessimalDecimal
I've used Emacs for years but just recently learned about zone.el. I wonder if this is based on it too. I see some of the same screensavers here.
seba_dos1
You can put them onto your Plasma wallpaper and/or lockscreen background with plasma-wallpaper-application: https://invent.kde.org/dos/plasma-wallpaper-application
(thought I'd share that since its raison d'être was to put Asciiquarium there :))
attogram
Gallery of current screensavers: https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/blob/main/gall...
Evidlo
Why does the cursor flicker around the screen for most of these? Does it have something to do with not double buffering the display?
attogram
Some artifact from asciinema maybe. Only shows up in the preview gifs. Needs to be fixed!
huhtenberg
For the 'life' screensaver it might make sense to use half blocks as a base rendering unit. ASCII 220 and 223.
alejoar
Doesn't work for me on MacOS:
I get "mapfile: command not found"
null
SeeManDo
Same here
SeeManDo
Bash Screensavers v0.0.27 (Mystic Shine)
./screensaver.sh: line 79: mapfile: command not found 1 .
(Press ^C to exit)
Choose your screensaver: 1 404 Screensaver Not Found:
Oh no! Screensaver had trouble! Error code: 1
seba_dos1
Get a Bash that's not ancient. mapfile is there since version 4.0 from 2009.
SeeManDo
Seems to be a old version of bash installed and used by default on macos
FergusArgyll
Cool
What are those commit messages?
attogram
See the spread-the-word script in https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/tree/main/spot... This script generates a series of shell commands to create a "spotlight" message on the main GitHub repository page. It does this by generating commands that make trivial changes to the top 12 files and directories and then commit those changes with custom messages.
warp
Looks like an attempt to make the main GitHub page (the part above the README) display something interesting. It is messed up now because of further commits, but you can see what it looked like at the time here:
https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/tree/a7369a93c...
seba_dos1
Protip for the author: --allow-empty ;P
kevincox
But that doesn't change the files, so it won't show up in the tree view as the user is trying to accomplish.
madsohm
AI slop - or worse, somebody trying to hide something.
A github project to collect a bunch of bash-based screensavers/visualizations.