Work / An aquarium of processes, a sky of passing aircraft and a flock at dusk, built in Rust with Ratatui.Experiments in the terminal
Why the terminal?
Awesome TUI got me interested in applications that treat the console as a craft. I liked their keyboard-first interaction and the care they put into using a small amount of screen space without demanding attention.
I wanted to see what modern terminal emulators, including GPU-accelerated ones, could make possible. Rust was the language I wanted to learn more deeply, and Ratatui gave me a way to build the interfaces and draw directly into terminal cells. The applications themselves render text and braille characters; GPU acceleration belongs to the emulator, not their simulation code.
Procquarium
Running processes become an aquarium. Memory determines a fish's size, CPU usage sets its swimming speed, and child processes follow their parent. New jobs hatch; finished ones drift to the surface.
I wanted the movement to carry information. You can select a fish to inspect its process, search by name, or hide the instruments and leave the tank in a spare pane. Changing a process's priority or sending it a signal requires explicit opt-in.
Overflight
Overflight answers a small question: what was that plane overhead? Nearby aircraft move across a sky chart with callsigns and trails. You can inspect a flight or switch to a view looking towards the horizon. At night, the stars and celestial positions are computed for the observer's location and time.
The live application uses aircraft feeds and estimates positions between updates. It also has an offline demo, shown here. Coverage varies, so it is for curiosity, not navigation or safety decisions.
Murmuration
Murmuration draws a three-dimensional starling flock in braille against an evening sky. Each bird follows local rules inspired by flocking research. An optional falcon provokes escape responses, and an evening cycle brings the flock down towards its roost.
It is an ambient simulation with no score or objective. The model is still evolving and is not a validated account of wild flocks. I later moved the simulation into GPU compute shaders for murmuration-gpu.