Display donut in the terminal

Aleix Mariné Tena — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 10:52:44 +0000

In the beginning of the times, the terminal controlled everything and the "graphical" applications were designed to produce graphics using only text symbols.

As time went by, every day people started using computers for every day tasks, making the terminal a tool that scared the average user. Operating systems needed a new face to be easily acquaintainced by the new users, even if a secret terminal was still running everything behind the scenes.

So nowadays people think that a game has to be developed in Unity or Unreal in order to have proper graphics, but this is not like this. We can do everything in the terminal, even rendering and displaying a mathematical shape such as a torus. For the sake of simplicity and to draw the attention of any American that could read this we will call the torus a donut.

To display a donut in your terminal create a donut.c file and paste this code inside of it:



/*
 * Original code in https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html 
 * 
 * Credits to Andy Sloane (github.com/a1k0n)
 * 
 * Extracted and refactored the code to be readable in order to study and comprehend it from the original 2016 
 * I resolved warnings, added some missing type declarations, added reasonable newlines.
 * Tested in Ubuntu 20.04
 * To compile it you need to link the C mathematical library with the -lm option.
 * 
 * (shell commands)
 * sudo apt install -y gcc
 * gcc donut.c -lm -o donut
 * chmod u+x donut
 * ./donut
 */


#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int k;
double sin(), cos();

int main()
{
  float A = 0, B = 0, i, j, z[1760];
  char b[1760];
  printf("\x1b[2J");
  for (;;)
  {
    memset(b, 32, 1760);
    memset(z, 0, 7040);

    for (j = 0; 6.28 > j; j += 0.07)
      for(i = 0; 6.28 > i; i += 0.02)
      {
        float c = sin(i); 
        float d = cos(j);
        float e = sin(A);
        float f = sin(j);
        float g = cos(A);
        float h = d + 2;
        float D = 1 / (c * h * e + f * g + 5);
        float l = cos (i);
        float m = cos(B); 
        float n = sin(B);
        float t = c * h * g - f * e;
        int x = 40 + 30 * D * (l * h * m - t * n);
        int y = 12 + 15 * D * (l * h * n + t * m);
        int o = x + 80 * y;
        int N = 8 * ((f * e - c * d * g) * m - c * d * e - f * g - l * d * n);
        if (22 > y && y > 0 && x > 0 && 80 > x && D > z[o])
        {
          z[o] = D;;;
          b[o] = ".,-~:;=!*#$@"[N > 0 ? N : 0];
        }
      }
    printf("\x1b[H");
    for (k = 0; 1761 > k; k++)
      putchar(k%80 ? b[k] : 10);
    A += 0.04;
    B += 0.02;
  }
}

Save the file. Then, install the GNU C compiler gcc if you do not have it. In Ubuntu / Debian systems you can use:



sudo apt install -y gcc

Then compile and run the code. Open a terminal and type:



gcc donut.c -lm -o donut
chmod u+x donut
./donut

You should see a donut being rendered in your terminal. It even does move!

For the full explanation on how the code works check the original post here
Credits to Andy Sloane (github.com/a1k0n)

DEV Community: Aleix Mariné Tena

Display donut in the terminal