Sansktrix

Sanskrit-Themed Matrix Screensaver for Your Linux/Unix Terminal – Watch Devanagari Characters Flow Like Digital Rain!

Compile

Install nscurses devel files (e.g. sudo apt-get install libncurses-dev on Debian based Linux distros). Make sure that you have g++ in the prompt. Clone the repository and from within it run:

./compile

You can test the screen saver by simply running

./sansktrix

in your terminal. By default the multithreaded rain printing version is run, which produces smoother rain effect with variable speed columns. By running

./sansktrix --single_threaded_print

a less resource hungry, single threaded version of printing will draw your rain. You may want to have a look into the source code and play with parameters to test their effects!

Set-up

Edit the header section of the sansktrix_daemon.sh within the repository

# Path to sansktrix executable
SANSKTRIX_PATH="$HOME/sansktrix/sansktrix"

# Default inactivity timeout in seconds
INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT=60 

# Single threaded printing (set equal to --single_threaded_print to enable)
SINGLE_THREADED_PRINT=

and add this line to your .bashrc file

# Start sansktrix daemon
$HOME/sansktrix/sansktrix_daemon.sh

You can test the script first by running it by hand and changing the idle timeout first

./sansktrix_daemon.sh

The daemon logs falling asleep instances in

/tmp/sansktrix_daemon.log

which is created anew every time the daemon starts. You can also kill the daemon at any time by calling:

./sansktrix_kill.sh

This is a simple script, so it will kill all instances of your .sansktrix. (regex matched) processes (watch out open vim sessions on matching files!).

Thanks

Many thanks to the authors of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude Code, and GitHub's Copilot, all of which tools have contributed to sketching and refining this code!

Contribute

Feel free to contribute bug fixes and improvements.