Termino

An endless runner for your terminal. Type termino in any terminal and it splits the pane and starts the game beside you — whatever was running in the current pane keeps running. Built for the dead time in a long build, deploy, or test suite.

 termino                                                          00268
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          ██
        █ ██ █  ██
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 space jump  ·  ↓ duck  ·  p pause  ·  r restart  ·  q quit

(a real frame, mid-jump over a cactus cluster — it's in colour in the terminal)

Install

npm install -g @whislyz/termino

The scope is only in the package name — the command it installs is plain termino, on your PATH. No alias to add, no shell rc to edit, no dependencies. From then on, in any terminal:

termino

Your pane splits, the game starts on the right and takes focus, and the thing you were watching stays put on the left. Press q and the pane closes.

Just want to try it once without installing? npx @whislyz/termino behaves identically — it splits too, launching the copy out of the npx cache.

Where it can split

termino looks for a way to split, in this order, and uses the first one that fits. A multiplexer wins over the terminal app, because when tmux is running its panes are the ones you actually see.

| | how | needs | | --- | --- | --- | | tmux | split-window -h | $TMUX — works on any OS, any terminal | | zellij | action new-pane | $ZELLIJ | | iTerm2 | AppleScript | macOS Automation permission, asked once | | WezTerm | wezterm cli split-pane | $WEZTERM_PANE | | kitty | kitten @ launch | allow_remote_control yes in kitty.conf | | Windows Terminal | wt split-pane | $WT_SESSION | | Terminal.app | AppleScript | has no panes, so opens a new window |

Somewhere else entirely — Alacritty, a bare ssh session, VS Code's terminal — nothing can split, so the game just plays in the current pane and says so. The portable fix is to run it inside tmux.

To skip the split deliberately:

termino --here          # or: export TERMINO_HERE=1
termino --where         # names the splitter it would use, and exits

Controls

| key | | | --- | --- | | space / ↑ / w | jump | | ↓ / s | duck (hold) | | p | pause | | r | restart | | q / ctrl-c | quit |

Cacti and low pterodactyls: jump. Mid-height pterodactyls: duck — they fly at exactly the wrong height and cannot be jumped. High ones pass overhead if you keep running, and will hit you if you jump into them.

The level shows under the score and turns over every 100 points. Clearing one pops a burst of confetti out of the dino's head and puts the new level up in the middle of the pane for a second — the pieces fall with their own gravity and wobble, and never touch collision, so a celebration cannot kill you. Progression is tuned so each stage arrives roughly twice as fast as it used to: the world tops out its speed after about a minute, pterodactyls start at 175, and night falls at 450.

High score lives in ~/.termino-hiscore (override with $TERMINO_HISCORE).

Requirements

Node 14 or newer, and a terminal with truecolor — which is nearly all of them now. Wants a pane of at least 44×12; 80×20 or larger looks right. Resizing re-lays out mid-game.

Developed and played on macOS with iTerm2. The game logic is tested in CI on Linux, macOS, and Windows across Node 18/20/22, and nothing outside the splitters is platform-specific — but interactive play on Windows Terminal is untested, so tell me if it misbehaves.

How it draws

Terminal cells are about twice as tall as they are wide, which is why most ASCII games look squashed. Termino instead treats each cell as two stacked pixels and picks one of ▀ ▄ █ per cell, giving a square-ish pixel grid of cols × (rows-2)*2. Sprites are plain ASCII masks in the source, # for set:

const DINO_BODY = [
  '.......#####',
  '.......##.##', // the gap is the eye
  '.......#####',
  ...

Collision runs per-pixel against those same masks, not against bounding boxes, so the dino's legs can pass beside a cactus arm that a rectangle would call a hit. Each frame is a single write, with colour escapes emitted only where the colour actually changes.

Development

git clone https://github.com/Whislyz/termino.git
cd termino
npm test

Both test harnesses fake a TTY, so they run headless over ssh or in CI.

test/clearance.js is the one that matters. Tuning a jump by feel does not work here, because "feel" hides obstacles that are quietly impossible. It brute-forces every jump timing against every obstacle at four speeds and prints the window of trigger distances that survive:

obstacle                   1.50         1.80         2.10         2.40
----------------------------------------------------------------------
cactus tall                1-17       2.5-23.5     4.5-31.5     6.5-37.5
cluster x3                  0-8       0.5-16.5       0.5-23         2-28
bird mid                    - D          - D          - D          - D

An empty window means no player could ever get past that obstacle. It caught three real bugs during development:

1. The tallest cactus was 12px while the jump peaked at 9.5px — unclearable.
2. After fixing that, one jump's ground travel was shorter than dino width + cactus width, so the dino landed back down onto the obstacle it had cleared.
3. Difficulty was inverted: the timing window was tightest on the very first obstacle and widened as the game sped up. That is why SPEED_START is 1.5px/tick and not something gentler.

If you change GRAVITY, JUMP_V, SPEED_START, or any sprite height, re-run it. test/autoplay.js 120 then plays a bot for two minutes and expects zero deaths as an end-to-end check.

Releasing

npm run release          # patch bump, or release:minor / release:major

That bumps the version, tags it, runs the gate, publishes, and pushes the commit and tag. Plain npm publish works too and runs the same gate.

The gate is scripts/preflight.js, which stops the publish unless you are logged in, the working tree is clean, you are on main, you are not behind origin/main, and the version is not already on the registry. It runs before the tests so the common mistakes fail in a second instead of after 30s of autoplay. Run it alone with npm run preflight.

The working-tree check matters more than it looks: npm builds the tarball from what is on disk, not from HEAD, so uncommitted edits ship silently and the git tag then points at code nobody published.

About the game

Termino is an original implementation, written from scratch. Endless runners where a character jumps obstacles are a genre, and game mechanics are not copyrightable — only specific code, art, and assets are. Every sprite here is a hand-authored ASCII mask in bin/termino.js, and no code or artwork from Chromium, Chrome, or any other implementation was copied or adapted.

Not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Google. Chrome and Chromium are trademarks of Google LLC, used here only to say what this project is not.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Do what you like with it.