If you’re a fan of the movie The Matrix then you probably have seen the scene where multiple lines of alphanumeric characters fall like rain, and it gives off such rustic dystopian cyber-punk vibes!
You probably have fallen in love with that scene, and you are not the only one. Linux developers have come up with a cool application that can give you just that.
The name of the app is CMatrix, and all it does is show flying text in and out of a terminal window (you can have it in green on black just like in the original Movie, or different colors).
Popular youtuber DistroTube (DT) also uses this a backlight to have in the background of his videos. In this article we’ll also touch a little bit of “ricing” as well. You can also check out this article where we setup i3 wm in Ubuntu.
Also, if CMatrix is not enough bling for your terminal we also have colorful ascii-characters welcoming you on your every terminal session!
Install Cmatrix on Linux
To install cmatrix in your Linux system, just run the below command and you’ll have it installed into your system:
sudo apt install cmatrix
Now you can go ahead and give the cmatrix command to see the magic!
To view information about the command you can give the following command to see the man-page of the command:
man cmatrix
From this you can find out about some of the flags of this command. Use the -b flag to make some of the floating characters bold. Similarly, the -B command can be used to set all of the characters bold. The -s flag can be used to display cmatrix as a screensaver.
You can also use the -c flag to use several colors for the matrix the valid colors are green (default), red, blue, white, yellow, cyan, magenta and black.
Ricing your Linux Terminal
Now that’s enough about cmatrix. But what if you want some more bling to your Linux Terminal! What you can do is randomize some ascii art to load up every time you open up your terminal. Or maybe you want to display your neofetch info every time you load up your terminal!
You can also check out fetchmaster6000, an alternative to neofetch! Also what we will be doing is following Derek Taylor and his GitHub Shell Color Scripts repo. First run the following command to clone the repo.
git clone https://gitlab.com/dwt1/shell-color-scripts.git
Now cd into the folder and then run the following command to install the color schemes:
sudo make install
Now you can test out the command using the following command:
colorscript -r
Now all you need to do is to edit your .bashrc file and everytime you open a new terminal there will be random colorful ascii art. Open your .bashrc file with your favourite editor:
vim .bashrc
Now simply go the very end and add the following command. This will run this command every time a new terminal window is opened and thus create colorful ascii-art for your terminal everytime.
colorscript -r
Now every time you open a new terminal it will show a new ascii-art and you won’t have a boring terminal anymore!
Conclusion
So there you go guys! Thats how you install Cmatrix and also rice your system a little bit. You can checkout r/unixporn for more ideas and tips and tricks on ricing your system. And for more such awesome content be sure to keep a lookout for LinuxForDevices! As always, thanks for reading!