Matrix Digital Rain

Matrix Digital Rain

Matrix digital rain, Matrix code or sometimes green rain, is the computer code featured in the Matrix series. The falling green code is a way of representing the activity of the virtual reality environment of the Matrix on screen.(English Wikipedia)

I was thorougly impressed by the gl matrix screensaver written by Jamie Zawinski and others. When screensavers were a thing in Operating systems, I regularly use these screensaver. In 2007, I tried to modifiy its code and get the letters in Malayalam!. Basically, I changed the file where the characters are taken and replaced it with Malayalam characters.

I even attempted to write this for all Indian languages. The old RPM packages with the changed code is available in http://mirror.downloadvn.com/nongnu/smc/Screensaver/ but may not be usable now.

We used to show this screensaver in free and opensource events just to catch attentions. Some of my friends asked if this changed code can be upstreamed. I asked JWZ and he replied this to me. And he was ofcourse right.

A few years later, I rewrote the same in Javascript inspired by this and this works.

Later, Jishnu prepared an android live wallpaper with the same concept. അക്ഷരമഴ is an app available in Google playstore(Source code)

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