What is drizzle?

Drizzle is a small Python program that turns your terminal window into a screen of falling numbers, similar to the digital rain effect from The Matrix, except the falling digits periodically come together to form a colored Pokemon sprite. The sprite holds still for a few seconds, then dissolves back into rain, and the cycle repeats with a new Pokemon. It has no practical purpose beyond being fun to look at. The program fetches Pokemon sprite artwork from an online source that renders images as colored terminal art, then converts the colors into falling ones and zeros so the animation matches the sprite's actual colors. While one sprite is displaying, the next one loads quietly in the background so there is no waiting between cycles. You can run it with a random Pokemon each time, or pass a specific list of Pokemon names to cycle through in order. While it is running, keyboard shortcuts let you speed up or slow down the rain, change how long the trailing digits are, adjust how dense the rain looks, switch colors, skip ahead, or pause the animation. The project is written in pure Python using the built-in curses library for drawing in the terminal and the requests library for fetching sprite data efficiently. It works on Linux, macOS, and Windows, though Windows users need to install an extra package for curses support. It needs a terminal that supports at least 256 colors, though it falls back to a smaller color set if that is not available. It is released under the MIT license.