Show HN: Bash Screensavers

Posted by attogram 10/28/2025

A github project to collect a bunch of bash-based screensavers/visualizations.

246 points | 77 commentspage 3

LeoPanthera 10/28/2025|

Of course, if used as an actual screensaver on a phosphor or plasma based screen, eventually the character grid would be burned into your screen.

A lot of screensavers, even historically, forget the original purpose of what "saving" your screen means.

FergusArgyll 10/28/2025||

Cool

What are those commit messages?

warp 10/28/2025||

Looks like an attempt to make the main GitHub page (the part above the README) display something interesting. It is messed up now because of further commits, but you can see what it looked like at the time here:

https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/tree/a7369a93c...

attogram 10/28/2025|||

See the spread-the-word script in https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/tree/main/spot... This script generates a series of shell commands to create a "spotlight" message on the main GitHub repository page. It does this by generating commands that make trivial changes to the top 12 files and directories and then commit those changes with custom messages.

seba_dos1 10/28/2025|||

Protip for the author: --allow-empty ;P

kevincox 10/28/2025|||

But that doesn't change the files, so it won't show up in the tree view as the user is trying to accomplish.

xxs 10/28/2025|||

instead of --amend?

seba_dos1 10/28/2025||

Instead of adding or removing a space in random files when making cute and useless commit logs.

xxs 10/28/2025||

that's what I meant - "amend" would not create any extra commits/entries

seba_dos1 10/28/2025||

...which is not a helpful advice when what they clearly wanted is to create a bunch of extra commits.

madsohm 10/28/2025||

AI slop - or worse, somebody trying to hide something.

Agingcoder 10/28/2025||

Why bother with Xwindow when you can have this ?

hk1337 10/28/2025||

This reminds me of having a screensaver in DOS.

adzm 10/28/2025||

I thought the same thing. I remember being in elementary school and seeing one of these terminate-and-stay-resident / TSR joke things that made the smiley face ascii character bounce around the screen. That led me to finally move on from Pascal and dive into C to make one of my own, though I'm pretty sure it would be possible in Pascal, all the (very obscure) information I could find as a child used C examples. When I finally had one running that would "Moo!" at random places I felt like a real hacker.

alka47 10/28/2025||

[dead]

_def 10/28/2025||

unfortunately quite inefficient, I'm sure higher framerates must be possible

(at least when running in docker, maybe that's the bottleneck, but I hesitated to run this on my machine directly)

alejoar 10/28/2025||

Doesn't work for me on MacOS:

I get "mapfile: command not found"

doodpants 10/28/2025||

After installing bash via MacPorts, it works for me. All except #3 cutesaver, which gives an infinite loop of:

  cutesaver.sh: line 55: shuf: command not found

seba_dos1 10/28/2025||

shuf has been a part of coreutils since 2006.

30minAdayHN 10/28/2025|||

I encountered this in another project. This should hopefully fix it:

zmodload zsh/mapfile

hinkley 10/28/2025|||

IIRC macOS is at least one major version behind in bash.

dylan604 10/28/2025||

something something licensing something something

new installs default to bash not being the default terminal. someone else mentioned macports, but there's a new version available via brew as well

hinkley 10/28/2025||

So far I have resisted the change. All the people I know who think zsh is great have a fairly large number of addons to get it that way.

dylan604 10/28/2025||

This first time I used a mac where zsh was the default, I was confused for quite a bit of time when it would not run something I was used to doing. I kept looking up errors on the internet until I came across someone's post with a reply asking if they were using Terminal on a new OS X. Sure enough, this was a new mac as well. Now I know one of the first steps for me with a new Mac is change default shell. I'm way too old and set in my ways to care to learn a new shell. Choosing a shell, IDE, font, etc are games for youth.

hinkley 10/28/2025||

I learned to consistently use shebangs at the top of scripts while working with the first zsh user I knew. Or might have been fish. No i think he started in zsh and moved to fish. Every time I forgot, his environment was busted. And he sat a cubicle and a half away from me, so I got fast feedback.

dylan604 10/28/2025||

Just last week I found myself trying to explain shebang to someone that knows nothing of coding, command line interfaces, or what shells are. At one point, I was wondering where it was I should have stopped talking, but it was definitely well before I finished.

SeeManDo 10/28/2025||

Same here

SeeManDo 10/28/2025||

Bash Screensavers v0.0.27 (Mystic Shine)

./screensaver.sh: line 79: mapfile: command not found 1 .

(Press ^C to exit)

Choose your screensaver: 1 404 Screensaver Not Found:

Oh no! Screensaver had trouble! Error code: 1

seba_dos1 10/28/2025|||

Get a Bash that's not ancient. mapfile is there since version 4.0 from 2009.

SeeManDo 10/28/2025|||

Seems to be a old version of bash installed and used by default on macos

SeeManDo 10/28/2025||

Even after updating still getting the same error

checked active bash version:

echo $BASH_VERSION

5.3.3(1)-release

seba_dos1 10/28/2025||

What's relevant is whether "/usr/bin/env bash" runs the correct one.

kridsdale3 10/28/2025||

I used "brew install bash && brew info bash" to get the path, then ran that shell (zsh doesn't work), then inside that new bash, ran the screensaver app.

I found the 4k fullscreen perf in iTerm2 to be not-great, so I did it again in the kitty (GPU powered) terminal macos app, and it was good.

prmoustache 10/28/2025|

Do screens still need to be saved?

blacksmith_tb 10/28/2025|

OLEDs are famous for burning in[1], so potentially "yes".

1: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2918628/your-oled-displays-w...

prmoustache 10/28/2025||

Don't tell me they burn when showing nothing or going to sleep?

We used to have screensavers with CRT because it took them a lot of time to power on and most early CRTs didn't have power saving capabilities so showing something wasn't significantly worse than having a black screen in term of power usage.