zcellterm

CLI toy, Zig implementation of the Wolfram Elementary Cellular Automaton, with various customization features Inspired by the Coding Train video on the subject.

Demo

Features

• Call any of the 256 rules of the Elementary Cellular Automaton
• Automatic terminal size detection, manual size setting, infinite mode
• Pre-computation of a specified number of generations before display
• Per-line display delay
• Start with only one active cell in the middle of the automaton, or specify a custom or random starting condition

Supported platforms for automatic terminal size detection

Tested

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows
• FreeBSD
• OpenBSD
• NetBSD

Untested, works in theory if you can build for those platforms (might be non-trivial)

• Haiku
• Solaris

Know how to implement size detection for a platform not listed here? Feel free to contribute!

Build

zig build

Release 1.0.2 tested with zig 0.13.0 and zig-clap 0.9.0 releases. Feel free to use optimization flags.

Thanks

I’m using the zig-clap library to parse arguments.

Thank you @AliceDiNunno for testing out macOS compatibility, as well as all the nice people on the Zig Programming Language Discord server who gave me their help and feedback.

I was able to improve the terminal size detection for Windows by taking example on softprops’ implementation.