February 15, 2026
Screenshots or it didn’t swirl
Show HN: Perlin Noise Terminal Animation in Rust (60 FPS, Truecolor)
Terminal lava lamp drops—crowd swoons, sleuths suspect AI
TLDR: A flashy terminal animation promises smooth, colorful waves at 60 frames per second, but launched without screenshots or a demo video. Comments split between happy users and skeptics demanding proof, with one investigator suspecting an AI-driven account—making trust and transparency the real headline.
Hacker News just got a rainbow lava lamp for the command line: a Rust-made toy that paints smooth, flowing color waves using Perlin noise—a math trick for natural-looking patterns—at a claimed 60 FPS. It comes in four vibes: Ocean, Fire, Aurora, and Matrix, and uses tiny block characters to make the picture look sharper. The repo is here: perlin-terminal.
But the comments are where the show is. One fan cheered, “Works great in my 320x90 kitty!” (kitty is a terminal app), while a chorus shouted “Screenshots or it didn’t happen”. “No video? I’m curious but not that curious,” sighed another, as multiple folks begged for a demo in the README—one even needed video examples for LED projects. Then the plot twist: a user went full CSI: GitHub, alleging this looks like “another AI project,” pointing to a brand-new HN account, a 4-day-old GitHub, and repos with pre-written blog posts, sparking a mini-mystery about who—or what—made this. Meanwhile, the crowd joked about flipping on Matrix mode to “hack the mainframe,” and fiddling with “Fire” settings like a digital campfire. Verdict: people love the eye candy, but they want proof, receipts, and a face behind the glow. Until then, it’s mesmerizing… and mildly suspicious.
Key Points
- •Perlin-terminal renders multi-octave Perlin noise animations in the terminal with 24-bit truecolor.
- •It uses half-block characters to achieve double vertical resolution and targets 60 FPS.
- •Themes include Ocean, Fire, Aurora, and Matrix, with responsive resize and clean exit controls.
- •Installation is via cargo from a GitHub repository or by building from source with cargo.
- •Configurable options include theme, noise scale, speed, FPS, and seed; requires Rust 1.70+ and a truecolor-capable terminal.