MACLIX

Of Easter eggs and red pill blue pill ruminations.

Get It Try It

Dali's a big fan of the movie The Matrix and he's hardly alone. As was realised as time went on there are many parallels with what Rixstep do. Dali's also a big fan of CLIX and asked if it were possible to put some 'Matrix green' in the command output.

Said and done but why not take things a step further? The Matrix 'matrix' as most people know is just reversed katakana; and Dali's fluent in it; so why not make a stab at Matrix output for CLIX - just for fun?

Indeed.

Available only in the ACP version, the 'MACLIX' Easter egg kicks in with a hidden preference. Tweaking the preference the one way produces only Matrix/3270 phosphor green on a black background (and amber on a black background for manpages) but flipping the preference the other way produces Matrix output.



The serendipity is in how katakana lies in the Unicode character set and how many ASCII characters are normally printable.

Katakana is a contiguous set beginning at 12449 and continuing for 95 characters; printable ASCII starts at 32 (space) and normally excludes 0x7f/127; space can't be used as it's of a different fixed pitch width and must be replaced by yet another character; as must the hyphen by katakana-wide counterpart; so what that all boils down to is the 'MACLIX' Easter egg output is a direct 'one on one' to ASCII.

After a while you don't even see the code anymore. All you see is blonde, brunette, redhead...