They run pretty!
Screensavers
CMatrix: Terminal based "The Matrix" like implementation
(run in xterm with mtx.pcf)
GPLv3 / C / ncurses / virtual console / xterm / Linux / Mac
- Original developer: Chris Allegretta in 1999
- Current maintainer: Abishek V Ashok since 2017
After the first The Matrix film release in 1999, the resistance is not only on the silver screen, but also in the reality, the original developer spent one evening to bring the green rain to real computer world, that has ever since assimilated many terminals.
The iconic Matrix digital rain may reveal secret inside your terminal, you may not able to decrypt the Matrix code nor to manipulate simulated reality, but you can control the rain with at least a dozen of options, scrolling styles, text attributes, fonts with actual Matrix-looking glyphs for virtual console and xterm, you can even make it rainbow!
Nyancat: terminal-based Pop Tart Cat animation
NCSA / C / ANSI / telnet / Linux / *BSD
- Original developer: Kevin Lange in 2011
- Current maintainer: Kevin Lange since 2011
In 2011, Pop-Tarts and a cat had an unusual union (by Christopher Torres), together with the cover song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! by Momone Momo, a new breed of digital feline was conceived on YouTube, it's called "Nyan Cat," and it has since been running in kittigilion-load of computers till today, and still nyaning through the galaxy.
And there was Nyancat, one of the first ones to computerize Nyan Cat for terminal fanatics' enjoyments, teleporting Nyan Cat and trailing bright colors to their terminals, it may not have many customizations, but it enables you with a simple telnet command to its server for endless nyan fix. Nyancat isn't alone, unicorn and little ponies soon to follow.
pipes.sh: Animated pipes terminal screensaver
MIT / Bash 4+ / Linux / Mac
- Original developer: Matthew Simpson in 2010
- Current maintainer: Pipeseroni since 2015
A script was originally published on Arch Linux Forums (see @pipeseroni's website), and then it started to crawl on many computers, to appear in every show-off desktop screenshots. People would ask "What's that colorful lines thingy?" "Pipes," the answer they would get and the script would be piped into their home directory, wherever they hoard interesting scripts.
It was only years ago, and the pipes and all its descendants, forks, and re-implementations still pipe strong. The inspiration was Windows' pipes screensaver, now it screen-saves terminals with colors and crawling pipes of amazing 10 types of pipes, from ASCII to Unicode box-drawing characters to railway to something called knobby.