Every OS has a screensaver. The terminal had nothing.
So I built drift — a terminal screensaver written in Go that activates automatically when your shell goes idle and disappears the moment you press any key.
https://github.com/phlx0/drift
How it works
drift is built on tcell and renders directly to the terminal at a configurable frame rate (default 30fps). Each scene is its own self-contained animation loop that fills the full terminal dimensions and reacts to resize events.
The shell integration is the core feature. When you source the init snippet, your shell installs a hook that measures inactivity time. After the configured timeout (default 120 seconds), drift launches in place. Press any key and you're back at your prompt — no intermediate screens, no delay.
# Zsh
export DRIFT_TIMEOUT=120
eval "$(drift shell-init zsh)"
# Bash
eval "$(drift shell-init bash)"
# Fish
drift shell-init fish | source
Scenes
drift ships four animations that cycle automatically or can be locked with --scene:
waveform — braille Unicode sine waves rendered in layers that breathe and shift phase over time. Three overlapping wave layers create a depth effect that's surprisingly hypnotic.
constellation — stars drift slowly across the terminal and draw edges between neighbors within a configurable connection radius. Star count, twinkle, and max connections per node are all tunable.
rain — katakana characters fall in columns, matrix-style. The charset, density, and fall speed are configurable.
particles — a flow field of glyphs with configurable gravity, friction, and count. Each particle follows a noise-driven vector field.
Scenes cycle on a configurable interval (--duration, default 60s) with shuffle support.
Themes
Seven built-in themes matched to popular terminal colorschemes:
cosmic · nord · dracula · catppuccin · gruvbox · forest · mono
drift list themes # preview all themes with color swatches
Configuration
All settings live in ~/.config/drift/config.toml. Running drift config --init writes the default file so you have something to edit from.
[engine]
fps = 30
cycle_seconds = 60
scenes = "all"
theme = "cosmic"
shuffle = true
[scene.constellation]
star_count = 80
connect_radius = 0.18
twinkle = true
max_connections = 4
[scene.rain]
charset = "ｱｲｳｴｵｶｷｸｹｺｻｼｽｾｿﾀﾁﾂﾃﾄﾅﾆﾇﾈﾉ0123456789"
density = 0.4
speed = 1.0
[scene.particles]
count = 120
gravity = 0.0
friction = 0.98
[scene.waveform]
layers = 3
amplitude = 0.70
speed = 1.0
Install
No Go required if you just want the binary:
# macOS Apple Silicon
curl -L https://github.com/phlx0/drift/releases/latest/download/drift_darwin_arm64.tar.gz | tar xz
sudo mv drift /usr/local/bin/
# Or via go install
go install github.com/phlx0/drift@latest
Pre-built binaries for macOS (arm64/amd64) and Linux (amd64/arm64) on the releases page. No CGO, no C compiler needed.
Why Go?
I normally reach for Python for terminal tools (I also built snip in Python + Textual). For drift I wanted a single static binary with no runtime dependency, sub-millisecond render loops, and direct terminal control without a framework abstracting the raw bytes. Go + tcell was the right fit.
Feedback welcome, especially if you have ideas for new scenes or themes.
Source: https://github.com/phlx0/drift
