What is dpgk?

dpgk is a small command line tool written in Go that wraps any other terminal program and turns its output into an animated rainbow of colors. You run it by putting dpgk before the command you actually want to run, for example dpgk vim main.go or dpgk htop, and the target program runs exactly as normal while its colored output is replaced with a shifting rainbow gradient. Its name is a playful parody of dpkg, the Debian package manager, standing for a Japanese phrase roughly meaning kids addicted to dopamine. Under the hood, dpgk starts your command inside a pseudo terminal, a technique that lets it sit between your real terminal and the program you launched. It passes your keystrokes straight through unchanged, but intercepts the color codes the program sends back and swaps only the actual color instructions for its own rainbow pattern, while leaving cursor movement, screen clearing, and text styling like bold or italic untouched. It tracks the cursor position to create a diagonal gradient effect, and if you are piping output rather than viewing it directly in a terminal, it automatically skips the rainbow effect and passes data through unchanged. You can control the animation speed in Hertz, set it to zero for a static rainbow, adjust how spread out the color bands are, and turn on a periodic redraw for otherwise still screens, useful for tools like htop. It works on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and can be run directly through Go's run command without installing anything, or installed via binary managers like mise and aqua, downloaded as a prebuilt release, or built from source. The project credits the ptyx library for cross platform terminal handling and the older lolcat tool as its inspiration for rainbow colored output.