Matrix-like Idle Animation for Emacs

Question

As is, my emacs is set up to show green text on a black background. On seeing it, a friend remarked that I just took it because of the Matrix-like appearance it gives. So, now what I want to do is implement an idle animation for it where, like in the matrix, changing text falls down the screen. Like in the zone out functions, it should run after emacs has been idle for a while. How would this be done?

Answer 1

You might want to check out the package zone: M-x zone

The 'zone-pgm-drip is like the Matrix drip, only one character at a time. I'm sure it could be enhanced to be more flood like. Also, the 'zone-pgm-jitter has text flooding down, but it's just the text currently on the screen (so it's horizontal extent is limited to what was already showing). You can just run M-x zone over and over until you find what you like.

If you want to limit the choices zone uses, you can restrict the array that zone uses:

(setq zone-programs [zone-pgm-jitter])

The choices for zone-programs are:

zone-pgm-jitter
zone-pgm-putz-with-case
zone-pgm-dissolve
zone-pgm-explode
zone-pgm-whack-chars
zone-pgm-rotate
zone-pgm-rotate-LR-lockstep
zone-pgm-rotate-RL-lockstep
zone-pgm-rotate-LR-variable
zone-pgm-rotate-RL-variable
zone-pgm-drip
zone-pgm-drip-fretfully
zone-pgm-five-oclock-swan-dive
zone-pgm-martini-swan-dive
zone-pgm-rat-race
zone-pgm-paragraph-spaz
zone-pgm-stress
zone-pgm-stress-destress
zone-pgm-random-life

Answer 2

You could just use the xmatrix screensaver, which could probably be modified to run in a window other than the X root if you really want it to run it within emacs. Bonus points if you can modify it to use glyphs based on the text in the current window. By strange coincidence, Jamie Zawinski both wrote xmatrix and large chunks of Lucid Emacs, which was subsequently released under an open-source licence as Xemacs.