driftlight

A calming terminal screensaver. Think cmatrix, but the opposite feeling.

Your terminal becomes the sea at night. Invisible currents drift through the dark and, where they pass, bioluminescent points flare cyan-green and slowly fade. Occasionally a shimmer sweeps across the water. It's slow, sparse, and low-luminance — built to be watched, or half-watched, while you breathe.

Pure Python 3 standard library. No dependencies. One file. MIT licensed.

Install

git clone https://github.com/YOU/driftlight.git
cd driftlight
./install.sh          # copies to ~/.local/bin/driftlight

Or just run it in place:

./driftlight

Controls

driftlight is interactive while it runs:

key	action
h	toggle the help panel
s	open the settings panel — change palette, density, breath, etc. live
q / Ctrl-C	quit
esc	close an open panel (or quit if none is open)

In the settings panel:

key	action
j / k or ↑ / ↓	move the selection
← / → or - / +	change the selected value
space	toggle / cycle the selected value

Every setting below can be changed live from the s panel without restarting — handy for finding the density and palette that feel right for your terminal. Pick a palette as a starting point, then fine-tune with the Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and Glow sliders to land on your exact color.

Why it's calm (and cmatrix isn't)

cmatrix is fast, high-contrast, and reads as urgent. driftlight inverts all three: motion is slow, contrast is low (dim pastels, not neon), and events are irregular and organic instead of rigid falling columns. The magic is in the timing, not the shape — nothing ever arrives or ends, it just breathes.

The premium touches

Everything below is optional and composable.

Breath-sync

The entire scene brightens on the inhale, holds, and dims on the exhale — and plankton bloom faster on the inhale. Within a minute your breathing tends to sync to it without being told to. A faint indicator in the corner shows the current phase.

driftlight --breath 4-7-8      # relaxing 4-7-8 breathing
driftlight --breath box        # 4-4-4-4 box breathing
driftlight --breath 5-5-5      # custom inhale-hold-exhale
driftlight --breath 4-4-6-2    # custom inhale-hold-exhale-hold

Circadian palette drift (on by default)

driftlight reads your system clock. After sunset the palette warms toward amber and dims ~15%; deep night gets darker still; morning cools back to cyan. It respects your melatonin. Turn it off with --no-circadian.

Long-arc weather (on by default)

A hidden meta-state on an ~8-minute cycle slowly modulates how much plankton bloom, so it never loops into the pattern-fatigue that makes people quit cmatrix after 90 seconds. Tune the cycle with --weather 12, or --weather 0 to disable.

Sleep wind-down

A slow ramp to near-stillness over N minutes — a wind-down for the end of the day. Start it and go to sleep.

driftlight --sleep 30

Options

flag	default	what it does
--palette NAME	teal	starting color: teal, ice, aurora, ember, mono, violet
--hue DEG	0	rotate the palette hue, -180..180°
--saturation N	1.0	color saturation multiplier, 0..1.5 (lower = washed out)
--brightness N	1.0	overall brightness gain, 0.3..1.8
--glow N	0.5	how long faint points linger, 0..1
--density N	1.0	how much plankton (0.2 sparse .. 2.0 dense)
--linger SEC	3.2	seconds a flash takes to fade out
--fps N	22	frames per second
--breath SPEC	off	off, 4-7-8, box, or a-b-c / a-b-c-d
--sleep MIN	off	wind down to stillness over MIN minutes
--weather MIN	8	long-arc bloom/calm cycle length (0 = off)
--no-circadian		disable warm+dim drift after sunset
--no-shimmer		disable the diagonal shimmer sweeps
--no-indicator		hide the breath indicator
--seed N		reproducible randomness
--256 / --truecolor	auto	force color depth (auto-detects COLORTERM)

A few nice recipes

driftlight                                   # gentle defaults
driftlight --palette violet --density 0.6    # sparse deep-sea purple
driftlight --breath 4-7-8 --palette ice      # cold, meditative, breathing
driftlight --palette ember --density 1.4     # warm firefly swarm
driftlight --sleep 45 --breath box           # bedtime

Requirements

• Python 3.6+
• A terminal with 256-color or truecolor support (basically all of them). Set COLORTERM=truecolor if your terminal supports 24-bit color but doesn't advertise it.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.