G33kShell

G33kShell is a cross-platform retro-themed desktop shell that wraps a CRT aesthetic around a custom command experience.

Highlights

• Boot-up BIOS prelude, login theatrics, and optional webcam face detection.
• Powered by Avalonia on .NET for cross-platform hardware-accelerated rendering with crisp pixel fonts and shader-based scanlines.
• Extensive built-in command set spanning navigation, search, system info, automation, and novelty utilities.
• Inline man pages, persistent history, and settings that remember your favorite skins, screensavers, and working directories.
• Skin system with RetroPlasma, RetroGreenDos, RetroMonoDos, and SimpleSkin.
• Idle timeout hands ownership to animated ASCII and pixel-art screensavers — many driven by AI brains you can train live.

Built-in Commands

• Navigate your filesystem with dir, tree, cd, pushd, popd, paths, and location.
• Inspect and manipulate files via cat, tail, copy, rm, mkdir, find, grep, whereis, and open.
• Integrate with the OS using reveal, space, clip, now, ver, worktime, shutdown, and max.
• Customize the experience with skin, screensaver, man, help, history, and the CP437 ASCII table.

Tip: run man <command> for auto-generated manual pages, or help to see every command and alias.

Screensavers

Cycle anything you like with screensaver -l and screensaver <name>—add _train to the AI-powered ones to watch them learn in real time.

• asciiroids, boids, bounce, clock, conway, crystal, cube, defrag
• donut, earth, fire, fluid, lemmings, mandelbrot, matrix, neo
• plasma, pong, scroller, snake, stars, swirl, tbibm, terminator
• tiefighter, tunnel, twister, willy, worms, xenon

AI-enabled screensavers (asciiroids, pong, snake) store their trained neural weights between runs so you can pick up right where your last session left off.

Quick Start

• Install the .NET 8 SDK.
• Clone the repo and restore dependencies: dotnet restore.
• Launch the desktop shell: dotnet run --project G33kShell.Desktop.

The application persists settings (skin, screensaver, path history, trained brains) under your user profile. Delete the settings file if you ever want a clean slate.

Development Notes

• Run the unit suite with dotnet test from the repo root.
• Avalonia assets live under G33kShell.Desktop/Assets; screensavers under G33kShell.Desktop/Console/Screensavers.
• To build your own screensaver, implement IScreensaver, expose a unique Name, and drop the class into the screensavers folder — screensaver -l will pick it up automatically.

License

MIT © Dean Edis. See LICENSE for details.