Create Effects in the Terminal LIKE A PRO

In the previous post: Easily Create Stylish Letters for Terminal, we showed how to generate names with fonts rendered in the terminal.

In this article we will show you how you can combine the previous information and create animations in the terminal.

This might be interesting for you to add to some command line or TUI application that you intend or are developing, to be the introduction or help and even as a boot menu.

See the effects in one of the videos below and right after the video there is a tutorial explaining step by step how you can reproduce it on your machine!

These effects are an application written in Python called: TerminalTextEffects, or just: TTE!

TerminalTextEffects (TTE) is a terminal visual effects engine. TTE can be installed as a system application to produce effects in your terminal or as a Python library to activate effects in your Python scripts/applications.

TTE includes a growing library of built-in effects that showcase the engine’s capabilities. These features include:

Xterm 256 / RGB hexadecimal color support
Complex character movement via paths, landmarks, and motion smoothing, with support for quadratic/cubic Bézier curves.
Complex animations through scenes with symbol/color changes, layers, easing, and path-synced progression.
Variable stop/step color gradient generation.
Event handling for path/scene state changes with custom callback support and many predefined actions.
Effect customization exposed through a typed effect configuration data class that is automatically handled as CLI arguments.

Runs inline, preserving terminal state and workflow.

Installation

To install just use Pip with the following command:

pip install terminaltexteffects

If your system presents any criticism during installation, it is probably because it adopts some security policies and you need to install it in a virtual environment.

To do this, run the commands below in order:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin/venv
python -m venv ~/.local/bin/venv
. ~/.local/bin/venv/bin/activate

Now install it in the virtual environment that was started:

pip install terminaltexteffects

Continue in this open terminal if you activated venv in it to run the effects!

Creating effects

There are several effects, EFFECT 1 in the videos above is Beams. To reproduce it, create a Python file, example: beams.py and insert the content below:

from terminaltexteffects.effects.effect_beams import Beams

effect = Beams("YourTextHere")

with effect.terminal_output() as terminal:

 for frame in effect:

 terminal.print(frame)

Where there is the string: YourTextHere is where you should put the text you want to animate. To run:

python beams.py

If you want to use files with ready-made and larger texts, for example, the file I used in the videos:

vim content.txt

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, officia excepteur ex fugiat 
enim labore culpa sint ad nisi Lorem pariatur mollit ex 
esse exercitation amet. Nisi anim cupidatat excepteur 
officia. Reprehenderit nostrud nostrud ipsum Lorem est 
aliquip amet voluptate voluptate dolor minim nulla est 
proident. Nostrud officia pariatur ut officia. Sit irure 
elit esse ea nulla sunt ex occaecat reprehenderit commodo 
officia dolor Lorem duis laboris cupidatat officia 
voluptate. Culpa proident adipisicing id nulla nisi 
laboris ex in Lorem sunt duis officia eiusmod. Aliqua 
reprehenderit commodo ex non excepteur duis sunt velit
enim. Voluptate laboris sint cupidatat ullamco ut ea 
consectetur et est culpa et culpa duis.

And change the code in the beams.py file so that it loads this file dynamically, leave it like this:

from terminaltexteffects.effects.effect_beams import Beams

with open('./content.txt', 'r') as file:
 content = file.read()

effect = Beams(content)

with effect.terminal_output() as terminal:

 for frame in effect:

 terminal.print(frame)