glowdrift

A full-frame terminal screensaver written in pure Python. Rainbow particles drift through an organic, slowly-evolving flow field, each one stamping a soft radial kernel that adds to the frame and decays about a tenth per step, so the motion leaves glowing trails on black. A hue-preserving tone-map rolls off the bloom without washing dense overlaps to white, and a diagonal hue gradient rotates over time so the whole wheel is on screen at once.

Two independent axes drive the movement: a motion model (how a particle moves, from smooth advection to divergence-free curl to chaotic double pendulums) and a direction field (which way it points, from combed waves to whirlpools to a breathing pinwheel). Mixing them is where the range comes from. On top of that sit opt-in restyle layers, kaleidoscope symmetry, pixelation, glitch, dithering, and scanlines, that fold any look into a mandala or drag it through a broken-transmission filter.

The renders here are the ones that lean on those effect layers, each held from a named preset and captured to a still. Everything is seed-deterministic, so every frame is reproducible from a single line of flags.