I enjoy projects that push the limits of what we expect from terminals. However, as an end user, I would be highly annoyed at a terminal with effects like this. My favorite thing about terminals is the minimal cruft from unnecessary peacocking. Every other mode of application has decades of built-up obligation to be flashy or entertaining in the way it presents information. Not terminals, though, that's the last place where less is more.
This was my initial reaction as well, but after some more consideration, I concluded:
1. This isn't for me
2. But some users have completely different expectations/desires
3. There's a place for terminals with features like this alongside standard terminals that remain simple. vi vs. vim vs. neovim come to mind here
3. I could see this being valuable for content creation that features a terminal, where communicating what is happening is more important than the local experience I'd otherwise expect to have while doing daily work
5. This would be even more valuable for narrative/story telling where the goal is to show something that's real while trying to appeal to a broad audience
Not my cup of tea, for the most part, but I can see a place for it.
so much effort is put into making terminals, aesthetic, customizable, and impressive. yet, not enough work is done in fixing the usability limitations of terminals (especially for casual users or beginners) such as: -command/argument discoverability, error forgiveness (being able to roll back a destructive command or detect and warn the user before executing), and general ergonomics
5 years from now, someone is probably going to be annoyed that this exists, but for now, CLI ecosystem in Rust getting better and better is awesome.
IMO Rust has some of the best ergonomics (difficulty of getting started with the language aside) for building great CLIs with crates like clap, ratatui and co.
As someone working a TUI game I wanted stuff like this myself so just wrote what I now refer to as a "terminot". Actual shaders and non grid align rendering. Nice to see people attempt to emulate it in a proper terminal emulator.
There's not much more to share presently. The game presently is very far from having gameplay. The "terminot" part is MIT licensed inside the game repo. The game itself is presently GPL3 licensed.
I think they wanted an example of each animation in a list.
But I'm going to add my own nitpick and say that there shouldn't be any gifs. It's a wasteful annoying format. Use a video for it's smaller size, better visuals and it's ability to be paused/played/seeked. An asciinema would be nice too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40503202
https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/showroom/