aesthetic-splash-screens

name

aesthetic-splash-screens

description

Design and build visually striking maki splash screens (the animated home screen behind the prompt) as self-contained Lua splashes. Covers the splash.render slot contract, the shared splash template, glyph-ramp shading, WGSL/GLSL shader porting, state management, perf budgets, and smoke testing without building maki. Use whenever someone wants a new splash, wants to polish an existing splash, mentions the maki home screen animation, asks to port a shader to a splash, wants to promote/bundle a splash into the maki distribution (the bundled splashes), or is exploring terminal eye-candy for maki, even if they don't say the word "splash".

Aesthetic splash screens for maki

Maki's home screen is a pull-driven canvas of terminal cells. A splash is a single Lua file that, given (w, h, t, fade), returns h rows of styled glyph segments covering exactly w cells each. This skill is about making those frames beautiful, not just correct.

What makes a splash look good

These come from building 17 splashes and watching what worked:

• One clear idea per splash. A spinning pentagram, rain with ripples, a Doom fire. The moment a splash has two ideas it reads as noise. Pick one effect and spend the whole budget on it.
• Restraint. Most cells should be background most of the time. Negative space is what makes the bright parts read. Full-field splashes (plasma, fire, caustics) are the exception, and they earn it by being smooth gradients, not clutter.
• Motion with memory. Trails, afterimages, and fades (* -> + -> : -> .) make motion legible at a glance. A thing that teleports between frames looks broken; a thing that leaves a decaying wake looks alive.
• Depth cues. Dim far things, brighten near things, cluster detail toward the horizon. Non-linear spacing (tunnel's r^0.55 rings) reads as 3D almost for free.
• Theme-aware color. Pull colors from maki.ui.theme_color so the splash belongs to the user's theme. Reserve hardcoded palettes (fire, caustics deep-water blues) for effects that ARE their palette. When a concept mandates a fixed palette (synthwave purple-orange), the intended split is: hardcoded colors for the scene, theme colors for the furniture (background, label, version). The scene is the art; the furniture should still match the theme.
• Calm timing. Splash effects run at 0.1-0.6 Hz in feel. If it pulses faster than ~2 Hz it competes with the user's attention instead of decorating the screen.
• A bottom-center label and top-right version give every splash the same furniture, so the cycle feels like one gallery rather than 17 apps.

The contract (short version)

Full reference: site/docs/content/splash/_index.md. The essentials:

maki.api.set_slot("splash.render", function(prev, w, h, t, fade)
  -- return h rows; each row is a list of { glyphs = string, style = ... };
  -- per row, all seg.glyphs concatenated are exactly w terminal cells wide.
end)

• w, h: cells. t: seconds since the splash appeared. fade: 0 -> 1 entry fade; multiply color intensity by it.
• Style is "field" (transparent spaces), a hex string, or { fg = "#rrggbb", bg = "#rrggbb", bold = bool }. Cache style tables and reuse them by identity: the renderer coalesces runs of the same table into one segment, so fresh tables per cell explode the segment count.
• Rendering is pull-driven: be pure in t, never block, never sleep. maki.ui.theme_color and maki.version() are fine to call.
• Stateful effects (cellular automata) keep per-size buffers, step by accumulated dt from t, and reset on maki.api.create_autocmd("SplashShown", { callback = ... }). See fire.lua/life.lua in the live config for the pattern.
• Every file also returns M with M.render(w, h, t, fade), so a cycler in init.lua can call splashes directly. Keep the set_slot call too; the cycler's later set_slot wins.

Workflow

1. Copy the template. references/template.lua has all the boilerplate. It ships every common helper (atan2, smoothstep, hash01, ...); delete the ones your effect doesn't use — dead helpers in a copied file mislead the next reader about what the splash actually does.

   Details: theme colors, style cache, grid builder, segment coalescing, tiny-area guard, label + version lines, and the shading helpers (quantized style, luminance glyph ramp, smoothstep, atan2). Fill in M.shade or the draw loop. Do not rewrite the boilerplate; it is the way it is because of hard lessons (style identity, UTF-8, fade handling).

2. Pick the idea and the genre (see the sparks list below). Decide early whether the splash is sparse (glyphs on background, most splashes) or full (every cell shaded, shader ports).

3. Smoke test after every change with the bundled script (no maki build needed; it runs under stock lua5.1 with a stubbed maki):

   lua5.1 scripts/smoke_test.lua --dir ~/.config/maki/lua kaleidoscope voronoi
   

   It asserts rows == h, exact per-row cell width (UTF-8 aware), no blank frames across sizes and time steps, and reports ms/frame.

4. Look at it as text before running maki:

   lua5.1 scripts/dump_frame.lua ~/.config/maki/lua/voronoi.lua 60 20 2.0
   

   Glyph-only dumps catch structural problems (asymmetry, clipping, label collisions) that unit checks miss. Background-color effects (fire) look blank in text dumps; inspect seg.style.bg values instead.

5. Run maki and watch the cycle. Color balance, quantization banding, and pacing are only judgeable live. Iterate on the one effect until it's unmistakable.

Shipping a splash in the distribution

Once a splash earns its place, promote it from config to the bundled splashes so every user gets it via require("splash.<name>") and sees it in the /splash picker. Promotion ships to every install, so it has a higher bar than the config playground.

Checklist (using mysplash as the example):

1. Copy the file to plugins/splashes_default/splash/mysplash.lua. Strip the set_slot call from the config version and add M.description (one line for the picker blurb); the module returns M with M.description and M.render and does not activate itself. Copy an existing splash's header.
2. Add "mysplash" to the SPLASHES list in plugins/splashes_default/init.lua. No Rust change needed for the splash itself. splashes_default is already a BundledPlugin entry in maki-lua/src/loader.rs; any .lua dropped under its splash/ subdir becomes require("splash.<name>") on the next build. The namespace is reserved (splash.* resolves bundled-first), so never give a config splash a splash. name.
3. Add the splash to the table in site/docs/content/splash/_index.md.
4. Verify in order:
   • lua5.1 .agents/skills/aesthetic-splash-screens/scripts/smoke_test.lua plugins/splashes_default/splash/mysplash.lua
   • cargo test -p maki-lua --test plugin_host (runs the real VM: boots the bundled renderers, checks the slot default, overrides, and error paths). just ci covers all of it on a full run.

Build-env gotchas (homura VM): export OPENSSL_NO_VENDOR=1 (system libssl-dev exists; the vendored build fails), and if include_dir! claims a file that exists does not, the 9p dentry cache is stale — sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches and retry.

Making frame tests non-flaky

Frame-asserting tests (the splash tests in maki-lua/tests/plugin_host.rs) assert things about frames, and stateful or RNG-driven splashes make naive thresholds flaky. Rules learned the expensive way:

• Drive warm-up time. A stateful splash starts far from steady state (matrix heads spawn up to 40 rows above the screen). Pull frames across many simulated seconds before asserting anything; pure splashes don't care, so drive all splashes uniformly.
• Sample several frames. Rain/CA density oscillates as drops respawn. Assert on the max of a handful of frames, not one arbitrary instant.
• Set thresholds from the expectation, not from what passed once. Compute the steady-state mean and its sigma (binomial over columns, or just reason about it), put the floor several sigma below the mean — and confirm it stays far above what a broken splash would produce (a splash that draws only its label and version shows ~15 cells, so any floor above that distinguishes working from dead). A threshold set at 1.8 sigma from the mean failed CI on the second machine that ran it.

Techniques that carry most of the weight

• Aspect correction. Terminal cells are ~2x taller than wide. For isotropic coordinates, advance x at half the y rate: nx = (px - w/2) / h, ny = (2*py - h) / h (y down). Circles stay round.
• Luminance glyph ramp. Map brightness to " .:-=+*#%@" and put the actual color in the fg style. The glyph carries shape, the color carries mood. Quantize RGB to ~5 bits/channel before building hex styles, or the style cache fills with thousands of one-frame colors.
• Deterministic hashing for texture. Starfields, rain columns, comet schedules: hash (x, y) or the index with an integer hash ((x * 2654435761 + salt) % 4294967296) instead of math.random. The frame stays a pure function of t, which keeps re-renders stable and testable.
• Drift instead of jumps. Parameters that morph over time (lissajous frequency ratio, wavebanner phase) should move with slow sines of t, period >= ~8 s, so the viewer sees evolution, not flicker.
• Performance budget. Established full-cell splashes run 2-3 ms/frame at 80x24 on stock lua5.1 (slower than maki's luau-jit by ~5x). Up to ~20 ms on lua5.1 is acceptable. If a shader port is too slow, hoist terms that depend on only one axis into per-column or per-row precomputes (aurora went from 33 ms to 9 ms this way), and memoize hashes.
• Small terminal guard. Below the guard size return flat_rows (solid background). Every existing splash guards; follow their thresholds.

Porting shaders (WGSL / GLSL / shadertoy)

Read references/shader-porting.md when porting from shader-gallery.html, shadertoy, or any fragment shader. It covers the coordinate mapping table, hash/noise functions in float-safe Lua, uniforms without a host (u_mouse becomes a slow sine orbit), and the quantization + hoisting playbook.

Idea sparks

For scenes with regions, horizons, or perspective floors, read references/recipes.md — it has the horizon split, perspective grid, and striped-sun math ready to adapt, plus palette guidance for lit scenes.

Genres already shipped, for contrast — orbital geometry (pentagram, lissajous), weather (rain, comets), cellular (fire, life), full-field shader ports (plasma, metaballs), typography (wavebanner, printer), perspective (tunnel, warp), nature (flowers). Six of the best are promoted to the bundled splashes (plugins/splashes_default/splash/): kaleidoscope, voronoi, caustics, metaballs, aurora (shader ports) and matrix (falling-code rain). Treat the gallery sources as canonical worked examples — they are the current bar for what ships.

Directions still open, roughly from safe to spicy:

• Fractal zoom: Mandelbrot/Julia with smooth iteration count -> ramp.
• Reaction-diffusion-ish: cheap Gray-Scott on a coarse grid, stateful.
• Raymarched primitive: one SDF sphere/torus with a moving light, shaded by ramp. Very few rays, huge payoff.
• Terrain flyover: value-noise heightfield rows scrolled toward the viewer, height -> glyph, distance fog.
• Clock/calendar art: the time rendered as geometry (orbital clock, binary tree of seconds).
• CRT/glitch: take any existing splash and add scanline dimming + rare horizontal slice offsets on a slow random schedule.

Whatever you pick: one idea, mostly background, memory in the motion, theme in the colors. Then watch it for a full minute before calling it done.