TermSaver

A simple text-based screensaver for terminal windows.

Background

The motivation behind this project is basically pure boredom (laughs). Seriously, it may look like nonsense to have a screensaver look-alike program running on a terminal window. Nonetheless, sometimes, we still want to see some kind of movement, or action on the screen... which invigorates one's state of mind and helps concentration back to the black screen (well, some people like it white, meh!).

If you are:

• looking for some extra display on your main terminal window, to keep the screen busy while you are up to something else; or
• looking for some distractions that may entertain you after too many hours in front of the terminal; or
• with plenty of screen space (so long 80x25 default terminal window! long live 1920px...), and use many terminals on screen; or
• just wanting to pretend you are busy with something (this is terrible)

then, TermSaver is the right application for you.

Requirements

• Linux, or Mac (or Windows too, but you are on your own)
• Python 3.x (Python 2.x was deprecated since 08-2020)

Installation

Pip (Pip Installs Packages, for Python Package Index)

For those using others, and still want to do it the easy way, I recommend:

    sudo pip install termsaver

From the Source

For the brave (laughs), you can compile/install from the source:

1. Download the Source here or here

2. Unpack it

    tar -zxvf termsaver-{version}.tar.gz
   

3. Build it cd termsaver-{version}/ python -m build

4. Install it cd dist/ pip install termsaver-{version}-py3-none-any.whl

Features

The TermSaver is a very simple application, built with the idea to allow more screensavers to be added to its core. Developers, please read the section below.

The current published screensavers are:

Ascii Art Farts

This is a screensaver that displays ascii art from asciiartfarts.com RSS feed in an animation format.

Clock

This is a screensaver that displays a digital clock using ascii letters.

Img2Ascii

This is a screensaver that displays images using ascii letters.

Jokes For All

This is a screensaver that displays recent jokes from http://jokes4all.net website, from its hourly updated RSS feed.

Matrix

This is a screensaver that displays falling (rising) Japanese characters simulating the screen from the movie The Matrix.

Programmer

This is a screensaver that displays source code from a specified path in visual animation. If the pygments package is installed, this screensaver will apply syntax highlighting based on the file type.

Quotes For All

This is a screensaver that displays recent quotes from http://quotes4all.net website, from its hourly updated RSS feed.

Random Text

This is a screensaver that displays a text (your name, or whatever) on a randomized position of the screen, changing position every N seconds.

Request for Comments

This is a screensaver that fetches documents from RFC (Request for Comments) in visual animation, which are documents elaborated by the Internet Engineering Task Force, available at http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/. This screensaver randomizes documents to display, from a list of latest valid documents. See more information about this in Wikipedia.

RSS Feeds

This is a screensaver that displays any RSS feed you want to show in your terminal, with customizable settings and format.

URL Fetcher

This is a screensaver that displays content from a specified URL directly on screen, in visual animation.

Star Wars Asciimation

This is a screensaver that displays the Star Wars Asciimation from http://asciimation.co.nz.

Sysmon

(For Linux/Mac systems only) Displays the CPU/Memory usage over time in a graphic alike screensaver.

WWTR.IN

Shows weather information from wttr.in

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Disclaimer Note: termsaver holds no responsibility for the contents offered by third-parties, nor it has controls to filter them. Use it at your own risk.

Developers

A more detailed guideline for developers willing to jump in and create screensavers for termsaver is here: https://github.com/brunobraga/termsaver/wiki/Developers

Roadmap

There is no current roadmap defined, besides improvement tickets created in Issues tab in GitHub. Refer also to http://github.com/brunobraga/termsaver/wiki/Brainstorming for some insights of stuff we are thinking about.

Contribute

Translation

The internationalization of this application follows same standards of most applications out there, by using gettext and MO/PO files.

The translation is still being finished up, and when it is ready for contributor calls, we will post detailed information about the procedure.

Screensavers (plugin)

As of v0.2, full plugin support is available, find an example here:

https://github.com/brunobraga/termsaver-figlet

Submit a bug

If you find any errors in this application, you are more than welcome to participate. You can:

• report the bug: https://github.com/brunobraga/termsaver/issues

• Fork this project: https://github.com/brunobraga/termsaver/fork

Uninstall

Using Pip (Pip Install Packages, for Python Package Index)

    sudo pip uninstall termsaver

Manual Uninstall

Just remove manually the following files:

    # For Linux boxes
    rm -rvf /usr/local/bin/termsaver
    
    # change your python version/location here
    rm -rvf /usr/local/lib/python3.x/dist-packages/termsaver* 
    
    rm -rvf /usr/local/share/man/man1/termsaver.1 
    find /usr/local/share/locale/ -name "termsaver.mo" -exec rm -rfv {} \; 

If the actuall location differ from the above, it might be worth it to just run the find command and look for them yourself (should not be hard):

    find /usr/ -name "*termsaver*"