So you want to tweet a program?

There are three rules:

1. It is tweetable
2. It can be copied and pasted
3. It does the interesting

Here is a simple example

I have tweeted it (rule 1). You can copy the code from the tweet and paste it into your terminal and you will see the same thing shown in the attached video (rule 2). And… I mean… lets be honest, these floating orbs are rather interesting (rule 3).

Floating Orbs

Okay, but how do you do that?

Stay tuned for future posts, where I’ll go over the things you need to know (eg how to make the terminal do these things) and offer some tips for how to make your programs fit into a tweet.

In the meantime…

Lets enjoy some more examples:

A “Game of Life” complete with a glider gun!

A dancing heart!

A Mandelbrot zoom

Using JavaScript to show that emoji are conjunctions of simpler characters

A 3-dimensional rope twisting up (video below)

The video for the tweet above was removed for using a song I don’t own, but it’s still available on Vimeo. It does use actual 3D modeling:

Bouncing zebra balls

Brain, Blood, Volume

You spin me right round, baby

Crimson and Clover

And finally, the magnum opus 🎉🎉🎉 Terminal Photoshop!

This one is my favourite, it uses mouse reporting and the video explains the rules and is objectively awesome 😜

Terminal Photoshop (press “q” to quit)

Want to try it yourself?

Well then check out the next post: Terminal Magic 101