Zoning Out With Nyan Cat
For those of you who haven’t heard of zone yet, I urge you to give it a try with M-x zone. If you like what you see, M-x zone-when-idle makes for a screensaver-like experience.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Emacs has facilities for playing tricks with your buffer text while you aren’t looking. I’ve always been wondering though whether you couldn’t do better and invent a graphical screensaver with it. After all, an image in Emacs is just a string with the appropriate display property set with the display engine taking care of the rest. A week of tinkering later I finally present you zone-nyan. Combine with nyan-mode and nyan-prompt for the holy nyan cat trinity in Emacs!
You might be wondering what took me so long. I’ve expected turning the original nyan cat animation into something roughly equivalent to require an evening, but did later find out that there isn’t any actual pixel art of it, just upscaled images of it with fractional pixel widths. GIMP in all of its glory doesn’t even support fractional pixel grids or rulers, so I had to use Photoshop for this one and transcribe the positions of all the moving objects, then spent the remaining time on thinking up a good way to encode these in a less brain-dead manner.
I did decide on giving SVG another try, simply because I was underwhelmed with generating bitmaps larger than an icon with Emacs Lisp. Dealing with a XML string is yucky, dealing with a nested list however is close to perfect if you’ve got something like esxml at hand to convert it to a XML representation. I’ve scrapped my previous approach of designing one big template where I fill in all the parts and adapted the approach from Land of Lisp instead where common building blocks are turned into function calls. That way you almost get a DSL for arranging the parts of your image and can easily modify parts of it.
Thanks to SVG transforms it’s no issue to upscale your image to something blockier while keeping grid coordinates. Figuring out how to clip the canvas was a bit trickier, but turned out to be simpler than expected with the clip-path attribute. With this combination you can resize the window and it will repaint to an appropriately scaled variant, even while the animation is playing. I’m pretty sure now that SVG makes for the most sophisticated way of doing graphics in Emacs, perhaps I’ll even go as far as rewriting retris to make use of it instead and drop the performance hacks…