It’s more likely than you think.
So as I said, I would push more updates. Since I have been re-homing my skills, I decided to tear apart the old CMatrix code and remove a lot of crufty stuff, including the need for all the ancillary fonts / utilities to see the symbols and the rather ugly default of standard Roman/English alphabet characters. I also added a pre-calculation option (-p) to see if it can improve performance on older or lower-end systems.
In order to accomplish this streamlining, this version does require ncursesw, AKA ncurses with wide-character support, in order to work. Given how long this has been around, I hope it won’t be too onerous of a requirement.
NB: This is no way an effort to take back maintainership of the program from Abishek, who has done an outstanding job maintaining the code. I just wanted something I could grab and compile and run without needed all the ancillary fonts and so forth. If there is interest in pushing some of this upstream, I’m happy to work with him do so.
For now this is just a fun exercise for myself and my son who has been helping me get back on my feet after my unceremonious exit from Google.
Obligatory screenshot:
If you’re interested, feel free to grab it from the release page on GitHub.