csakura 2.0 🌸

A sakura tree with falling petals for your terminal — in the spirit of cmatrix and cava, but prettier.

• Procedurally grown cherry-blossom tree (different every run, press r to regrow)
• Petals drift down on a wandering wind, settle on the ground, and fade
• Auto-adjusts to any terminal size, regenerates on resize
• Written in C99 + ncurses, low CPU (default 20 FPS)
• 15 blossom color palettes (-c / press c)
• Live keyboard shortcuts for every setting — palette, petals, wind, speed, ASCII and flat mode, all without restarting
• Matching HTML demo in web/

The tree is grown rather than stamped. The canopy now follows the limbs that were actually generated instead of a fixed arrangement of blobs, so no two crowns share a silhouette:

• Clumped blossom. Two octaves of value noise break the crown into clusters, with a per-column wobble roughing up the outline — a cherry, not a smooth dome.
• Directional light. Light falls from the upper left and the mass shades what hangs below it, so the crown has volume instead of a flat tint.
• Limbs through the blossom. Branches show through where the clusters thin, following the noise field so a limb emerges as a continuous run rather than a scatter of dashes.
• Smooth taper. Trunk and branches use partial block glyphs (░▒▓) at their edges, so the wood curves instead of stepping, and the trunk keeps its proportion to the crown at every terminal size.
• Shaded cells. Canopy cells sit on a dark tint of the blossom colour, and the block glyphs blend the ramp step against it — this is what lets eight colours read as a solid, saturated mass with a fringe that dissolves.
• Sane at any shape. A short split, a tall narrow pane, or a full screen all get a correctly proportioned tree rather than a pancake or a lamppost.

The shaded cells mean csakura paints a background behind the canopy, so a transparent terminal no longer shows through it. Pass -t (or press t) for flat mode, which never paints cell backgrounds and keeps your terminal — or your wallpaper — visible behind the tree.

From the AUR, with yay (or paru):

yay -S csakura        # latest release
yay -S csakura-git    # builds from main

Or build the PKGBUILD by hand:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel ncurses
git clone https://github.com/realstrawhat/csakura.git
cd csakura
makepkg -si

Or without pacman at all:

make && sudo make install

Uninstall: sudo pacman -R csakura or sudo make uninstall.

With Homebrew:

brew install ncurses
git clone https://github.com/realstrawhat/csakura.git
cd csakura
brew install --HEAD --formula ./Formula/csakura.rb

Or build yourself:

brew install ncurses
git clone https://github.com/realstrawhat/csakura.git
cd csakura
make
sudo make install

Then run csakura. Uninstall with brew uninstall csakura or sudo make uninstall.

Need a C compiler + wide-char ncurses (libncursesw5-dev / ncurses-devel):

git clone https://github.com/realstrawhat/csakura.git
cd csakura
make && sudo make install

csakura [options]

  -f FPS    frames per second, 5-60 (default: 20)
  -p NUM    petal density, 1-10 (default: 5)
  -w NUM    wind strength, 0-10 (default: 1)
  -c NAME   blossom palette (default: sakura)
  -a        ASCII glyphs only (no unicode blossoms)
  -t        flat mode: never paint cell backgrounds, so a
            transparent terminal shows through the canopy
  -h        help
  -v        version

palettes:
  sakura, rose, blush, magenta, peach,
  coral, sunset, gold, lavender, violet,
  sky, mint, matcha, white, ink

Examples:

csakura                 # default
csakura -f 12 -p 3      # chill / low CPU (nice in a side pane)
csakura -p 10 -w 6      # windy petal storm
csakura -c mint         # mint palette
csakura -t              # let a transparent terminal show through

Everything is tunable live — you never need to restart to try a setting.

Uppercase letters are shifted, so C is Shift+c.

The same keys work in the web version, which also has a click-through panel behind the faint ⋮ in the corner.

Open web/index.html in a browser for the same animation. The faint ⋮ in the corner opens the full set of controls — palette, petal density, wind, speed, ASCII glyphs and flat mode — and the terminal keys all work too (r c/C a t p/P w/W +/-). Settings persist across visits. You can also enable GitHub Pages on the /web folder for a live demo.

• Best with a 256-color terminal (kitty, iTerm2, or modern Terminal.app). The shaded canopy needs 256 colors; on an 8-color terminal csakura falls back to flat mode automatically.
• Unicode blossoms need a font that has them (most Nerd Fonts do). Use -a if not.
• On macOS, Homebrew’s ncurses is recommended for the best color support.
• Running over a transparent or image background? Use -t.

If you use csakura, please credit realstrawhat
(https://github.com/realstrawhat/csakura).

MIT