This is a cli tool that can show all elementary Cellular Automata on a text based terminal. More details about elementary cellular automata here: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.html.
It displays the CA on the terminal with whatever character you pass in ascii or unicode. If you pass a unicode character just one unicode code point is allowed.
Help from the command itself is, I think, self-explanatory:
ca-term 0.0.4
Author: est357
Description: Cellular automata for terminal
USAGE:
ca-term [OPTIONS]
FLAGS:
-h, --help Prints help information
-V, --version Prints version information
OPTIONS:
-c, --character <display_character>
The character with which it will be drawn. Just 1 character. [default: ◼]
-g, --generations <generations> How many lines it should generate. Number value. [default: 100]
-b, --init_bit <initial_bit>
Initial bit 1 position. Between 0 and width value. Number value. [default: 103]
-i, --interval <interval_between_generations>
Time interval in us to wait bewtween generations. Number value. [default: 200000]
-r, --rule <rule>
The CA rule number according to https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.html. Number
value. [default: 30]
-w, --width <width>
No of columns of the array, should match terminal width for best results. Number value. [default: 206]
The binary from "Releases/ca-term-<version>-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz" should work on most linux distributions. It can also be installed with cargo:
cargo install ca-term
By default it disables line wrap. Usual signals are handled but if you, for example, kill -9 the process, you will end up with unwrapped lines in the terminal.
To disable/enable line wrap in your terminal do this:
# Disable line wrap
tput rmam
# Enable line wrap
tput smam
If you want you can generate a image like this:
ca-term -g 250 -b 250 -w 500 | pango-view --font=mono -qo rule30_gen1.png /dev/stdin
It can also be used as a seed for sha256 private key from which a crypto currency address (like ETH,BTC) can be generated.