What is asciiquarium-js?

Asciiquarium is a fun terminal animation that displays an underwater scene made entirely of ASCII art characters: fish, sharks, and other sea creatures swimming across your terminal window. It is a re-implementation in JavaScript for Node.js of an original program written in Perl by Kirk Baucom, with additional fish species added from a separate Android live wallpaper project. The program runs directly in your terminal and animates continuously. You can interact with it using keyboard shortcuts: press a key to drop a fishhook, summon a shark, pause the animation, or force a redraw. If you resize your terminal window, the scene rebuilds itself to fit the new dimensions. The JavaScript port has zero external dependencies, it draws everything using raw ANSI escape codes, the standard way programs add color and cursor movement in terminals, which means it works in any terminal that supports those codes. You would use this when you want a lighthearted, animated screen decoration in your terminal, for fun, as a background for a video call, or just because it looks nice. Install it globally with npm and run the single command to start it. It requires Node.js version 14 or newer. The project is licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, the same license as the original Perl asciiquarium, and credits the original author, the artist behind the ASCII art, and the person who added the extra fish species.