🦐 clawtime

The nanoclaw shrimp, waving hello right in your terminal — redrawn with the expressive ASCII density and fluid motion of Ghosttime. The raised claw waves, the antennae sway, the eyes blink, and a few bubbles and glints drift past. On each launch, Clawtime randomly chooses the wave or Nano Jump mode, whose snappy loop has a crouch, launch, airborne stretch, landing squash, and recovery. Use a mode flag whenever you want a specific one. Smooth, flicker-free, focus-aware, and auto-centered, with basically no CPU when you're not looking.

Inspired by ghosttime; the terminal engine is derived from it.

Run it

# no install
npx clawtime
npx clawtime --jump

# or install globally
npm install -g clawtime
clawtime

Press q or Ctrl+C to exit. A terminal with 24-bit ("truecolor") support shows the mascot best — that's most modern terminals (Ghostty, iTerm2, Kitty, WezTerm, VS Code…).

Options

| Flag | Description | | --- | --- | | -c, --color <name\|#hex\|r,g,b> | Recolor the body (e.g. -c pink, -c '#ff66cc', -c 255,120,180). Default is nanoclaw teal. | | -w, --wave | Always play the claw-wave animation. | | -j, --jump | Always play the Nano Jump animation. | | --mode <wave\|jump> | Select an animation mode explicitly instead of choosing randomly. | | --select-color | Pick a color interactively. | | --colors | List the available color names. | | -t, --timer <seconds> | Run for a set duration, then exit. | | -nf, --no-focus-pause | Keep animating even when the terminal loses focus. | | -h, --help | Show help. |

clawtime -c cyan        # a cyan shrimp
clawtime -c '#ff9ecb'   # any hex color
clawtime --wave         # always wave the raised claw
clawtime --jump         # crouch, launch, land, recover
clawtime --mode jump    # the explicit mode form
clawtime --jump -c pink # modes and colors compose
clawtime -t 10          # wave for 10 seconds
clawtime -nf            # never pause

How it works

Like ghosttime, the animation is a set of pre-rendered frames plus a few ANSI/DEC escape-sequence tricks:

• Time-based frame clock. The current frame is derived from elapsed wall time (~33 fps), so playback self-corrects and only redraws on change — idle CPU stays near zero.
• Flicker-free rendering. It probes for DEC mode 2026 (synchronized output) and paints each frame atomically when supported, otherwise falls back to a cursor-home line-by-line overwrite.
• Focus-aware pause. Enables focus reporting (?1004) and pauses/resumes when you switch away — disable with -nf.
• Good terminal citizen. Alternate screen buffer, hidden cursor, auto-centering, full restore on exit. Zero runtime dependencies.

The art

The mascot is built directly from the actual nanoclaw logo, not a hand-drawn approximation:

1. scripts/rasterize.mjs rasterizes the official SVG (assets/nanoclaw-light-square.svg), crops it to the mascot, downsamples to a ~64-wide grid, flood-fills the white background to transparency (so the eye catchlights survive), and quantizes to the mascot's palette. It splits the sprite into two layers — the body and the raised claw (SVG path #15 plus only its nearby navy outline) — and records an overlapping shoulder pivot → scripts/base-sprite.json.
2. scripts/generate.mjs builds two seamless loops. The default 84-frame loop rotates the claw about the shoulder with an eased wave envelope while the antenna tips sway and the face blinks. The 36-frame Nano Jump loop uses the reference emoji's key beats—anticipation, stretch, apex, landing squash, and recovery—with a grounded shadow and restrained impact effects → src/animation-data.ts.
3. At runtime, src/animation.ts turns each pair of source rows into one line of $, %, *, @, +, x, ~, and · density characters. The result has Ghosttime's soft ASCII texture while retaining Nanoclaw's 24-bit teal, navy, highlights, face, and silhouette. -c recolors the body and automatically derives matching shade, highlight, and bubble tones.

Develop

npm run dev            # run from source (needs bun)
npm run gen            # rebuild src/animation-data.ts (animation) from base-sprite.json
npm run raster         # rebuild scripts/base-sprite.json from the SVG (macOS; needs qlmanage + sips)
npm run build          # bundle src/cli.ts -> dist/cli.js (needs bun)

# preview the art (writes HTML to stdout):
node scripts/generate.mjs --pixels 0 > frame0.html   # source pixel grid
node scripts/generate.mjs --hero      > hero.html    # two colored ASCII poses
node scripts/generate.mjs --ascii 0                  # plain terminal characters
node scripts/generate.mjs --ascii 11 --jump          # jump apex

Credits

• Terminal engine adapted from ghosttime by Sohel Islam Imran (MIT).
• Mascot artwork: the nanoclaw shrimp (nanoclaw.dev).

License

MIT