movy

movy is a terminal-based graphics and animation engine that brings pixel-level rendering, visual effects, and interactivity to text mode.

Tip

The neon banner above is a live movy program - a looping logo reveal rendered on the new Frame path. See how it's made (and run it yourself) in examples/logo-morph:

zig build run-logo-morph

Overview

movy began with a simple vision - to bring real rendering power to the terminal - treating text mode as a programmable graphics environment rather than plain text output.

The engine provides:

• Layered rendering with alpha blending, z-ordering, and compositing.
• Programmable pipelines for chaining effects, transitions, and post-processing.
• Frame-based rendering - a float framebuffer with a persistent glow/bloom buffer and a built-in CRT post-fx stack (vignette, scanlines, flash, tint), giving a neon look essentially for free. Ideal for games and shader-toy-style demos.
• Sprite and surface abstraction for transparent drawing and dynamic frame animations.
• Half-block rendering for double vertical resolution.
• Animation control via IndexAnimators, waveform generators, and easing functions - driving frame indices, colors, positions, and other parameters.
• High-throughput output - DiffOutput re-paints only the terminal rows that changed, with an optional background writer thread, for smooth 60fps even under tmux / ssh.
• Keyboard, mouse, and kitty-protocol input - including true key press / repeat / release events on supporting terminals.

Rendering, animation, effects, and input are independent yet interoperable subsystems.

The result is a modular visual engine - expressive, composable, and built for creative experimentation.

(alien mouse move demo)

(dev snapshot of a game)

(frame-game - a neon platformer built on the new Frame rendering path - play it with zig build run-frame-game, read it in demos/frame-game)

Core Concepts

movy is organized around a few core types that coordinate how visuals are drawn, animated, and composed on screen.

For rendering specifically, movy offers two paths. They share the same RenderSurface, Screen, and terminal output, so you can mix them - but each is tuned for a different job:

Path	Draw onto	Best for
Compositing Path	RenderSurfaces, layered through an effect pipeline	UI, sprite scenes, video playback, transitions, demos that combine many independent visual layers
Frame Path	a single Frame (float framebuffer + glow + CRT post-fx)	fast-moving games and shader-toy-style demos that want a neon look for free

Rendering Path 1 - Compositing

Layered surfaces, composited through a programmable effect pipeline.

• RenderSurface is the foundational structure - a 2D matrix of pixels (with optional text overlays) that anything visual draws onto. It supports alpha, can be resized, cleared, scaled, rotated, and converted to ANSI via .toAnsi().

• RenderEffect modifies a RenderSurface by applying visual transformations such as blur, dim, stretch, or color shifting. It receives input and output surfaces via a RenderEffectContext, which handles size awareness and expansion when needed. Internally, RenderEffect acts as an interface and wraps an effect instance to make it compatible with chaining, pipelines, and dynamic surface management.
  Each effect defines its own run() method and validate() method, and can optionally declare how much space it requires beyond the surface bounds. Effects can be run manually on surfaces, or exposed through a simple asEffect() function to integrate cleanly into the rendering system. They will automatically operate with RenderEffectContext, gaining full expansion handling and chaining capabilities.

• RenderEffectContext bundles an input surface, an output surface, and tracks any applied surface expansion. It allows effects and chains to dynamically resize their output to support visuals like glow or shake.

• RenderEffectChain is a reusable sequence of effects, applied in order to a RenderEffectContext. It takes care of intermediate surface allocation and ensures the final output is properly expanded. It's ideal for chaining multiple post-processing steps like fade -> blur -> glow.

• RenderObject combines a RenderEffectContext with an optional RenderEffectChain. It acts as a unit of rendering - providing a structured way to send a visual input surface through the effect system. The output surface is automatically created and kept in sync. (Conceptually, it's "a surface + maybe effects".)

• RenderPipeline processes a list of RenderObjects. Each object's effect chain (if present) is run, and their results are composited using the RenderEngine. Optionally, a final post-processing chain can be applied to the merged result.

• RenderEngine performs the actual surface merge. It composites multiple RenderSurfaces into a single output, applying z-ordering and visibility logic. It supports multiple blending modes: binary transparency for performance-critical rendering, and full Porter-Duff alpha compositing for true semi-transparent effects. This is used by the pipeline, UI system, and manual rendering flows.

Rendering Path 2 - Frame (neon-render layer)

A single float framebuffer with a built-in post-processing stack. Instead of compositing many surfaces, you draw straight into a Frame, which gives the neon look essentially for free. Great for games - see the frame-game demo for a complete, copy-able example.

• Frame is a float framebuffer built on top of a RenderSurface, with two layers and its own effect stack:

  • a solid layer for opaque colors (background, bodies, tiles) - you rewrite it each frame, and
  • a glow layer that is additive and persistent: every beginFrame() it is blurred and decayed, then the frame's emissions are added on top. A bright thing at a still spot becomes a stable bloom; if it moves, you get a neon trail - with zero per-object bookkeeping.

  composite() mixes the two and runs the post-fx chain - clamp(solid + glow) -> vignette -> scanline -> warmth -> flash -> tint - into the owned RenderSurface that Screen / DiffOutput consume. Drawing is simple: px / rect / hline / vline / shadeRect for solid, and gpx / grect / ghline / gvline / gring for glow. savePng() provides a headless screenshot dev loop (render N frames, save a PNG, look - no terminal needed).

• color.V3 is the linear float color used while drawing (V3{ r, g, b }, 0..1, allowed to exceed 1.0 while light accumulates - that's what makes glow bloom). Helpers: v3(r,g,b), .add / .scale / .mul / .lerp, .toRgb() / .fromRgb(). composite() clamps and quantizes to 8-bit for you.

Output - shared by both paths

• Screen holds the final output surface. Manually, it allows you to add RenderSurfaces or Sprites directly and call screen.render() to composite them using the RenderEngine. Alternatively, its output surface can be rendered by the RenderPipeline, the UI Manager, or fed a Frame's composited surface. Finally, screen.output() prints the result to the terminal using ANSI escape sequences.

• DiffOutput is a faster, drop-in replacement for screen.output(). It compares each terminal row against the previous frame and re-sends only the rows that changed (unchanged rows cost zero bytes), and in .threaded mode hands the blocking write to a background writer thread - so the render loop never stalls, dropping a frame instead of freezing. This is what keeps things smooth at 60fps, especially under tmux / ssh.

Sprite Rendering

• Sprites hold a SpriteFrameSet: an array of frames, each with its own RenderSurface.
• Changing the current frame index animates the sprite.

Animation Helpers

• IndexAnimator is a generic animation helper that updates indices over time. It supports forward, reverse, ping-pong, and one-shot modes, and can also be used for palette cycling, or any index based effects.
• TrigWave provides reusable sine and cosine generators with internal state. These simplify wave-based animations such as pulsing highlights, bobbing motion, or cyclic transitions.
• Easing - for easing curve based animations, functions for easing -in/-out/-inout are provided.

movy_video

movy_video adds full-motion video playback to the terminal, built on FFmpeg and SDL2.

• Video decoding for all FFmpeg-supported formats (.mp4, .h264, .avi, .mkv, .webm, etc.)
• Audio playback with synchronized timing using SDL2
• Frame scaling and conversion to RGB for terminal rendering
• Audio/video synchronization with configurable sync windows
• Seeking with forward/backward navigation
• Frame queueing for smooth playback

The module exposes a VideoDecoder type that manages the entire decode pipeline, from opening media files to extracting frames and audio samples. Video frames are automatically scaled and rendered to movy RenderSurface objects, allowing seamless integration with the rest of the rendering engine.

See movycat for a complete terminal video player built with movy_video.

FFmpeg Compatibility

movy_video has been tested and confirmed working with:

• FFmpeg 8.0 (macOS via Homebrew)
• FFmpeg 7.1.1 (Ubuntu via apt)

The module uses the modern FFmpeg channel layout API (AVChannelLayout) and is compatible with both FFmpeg 7.x and 8.x versions.

Building

Works with zig 0.15.2

zig build              # build without ffmpeg dependencies, movy_video
zig build -Dvideo=true # build full movy incl movy_video, requires ffmpeg

Testing

Tests currently cover:

• RenderEngine: composition modes, alpha blending
• Sprite: splitting functions
• Indexanimator
• RenderSurface: scaling

zig build test

Documentation

• Guides - Documentation on core concepts like RenderSurface and RenderEngine, written for developers new to movy
• Examples - Code examples demonstrating specific features (alpha blending, PNG loading, sprite animations, rotation / scaling, ...)
• Demos - Programs showcasing visual effects, animations, and interaction
• Release Notes - What's new in the latest release (see CHANGELOG.md for the full history)

The sections are being updated frequently.

Tip

Building a game? Start with frame-game. It's a complete, copy-able neon platformer that shows the new Frame rendering path end to end - persistent glow/bloom, linear float V3 color, 60fps DiffOutput, and kitty-protocol input - alongside sub-pixel platformer physics, tile collision, and a follow camera with screen shake.

zig build run-frame-game                         # play it
zig build run-frame-game -- --shot 160 out.png   # headless: render 160 frames to a PNG

Its README is a full walkthrough of the Frame path.

Showcase: Built with movy

Project	Description	Preview
1ST-SHOT	Terminal bullet-hell shooter with SID audio
movycat	Terminal video player
Your project here?		Post in the Community Showcase Discussion!

Contributing

movy is a work of love and dedicated vision, still evolving rapidly. External code contributions are paused for now, but ideas and feedback are always welcome - see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

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Made with <3 and Zig