life

Conway's Game of Life, animated in your terminal.

Gosper glider gun

Related projects

• lpchart — Chart InfluxDB line protocol in your terminal. Browse measurements, fields and tag sets interactively without knowing what is in the file first.
• nimo — nano-inspired terminal text editor written in pure Nim.
• totp — Terminal TOTP authenticator: live 2FA codes with countdown (RFC 6238, Go, Bubble Tea)
• crypto-charts — Terminal crypto price charts: top coins and price history from the free CoinGecko API (Go, Bubble Tea)
• classical-ciphers — Encode and decode classical ciphers in your terminal, live as you type (Atbash, Caesar, Vigenère, Rail Fence)
• calc — Live terminal calculator: evaluates arithmetic as you type, no Enter key (Go, Bubble Tea)
• algebra-visual — Live terminal function grapher: plot y = f(x) as you type (Go, Bubble Tea, ntcharts)

Run

go run .

Or build a binary with go build -o life . and run ./life.

Usage

The board starts on a random soup and evolves on its own. Press space to play or pause, and n to advance one generation while paused. Press r for a fresh random board or g to load a Gosper glider gun. Press c to clear the board. Use + and - to change the speed, and q to quit.

The board wraps at the edges, so patterns that run off one side reappear on the other. Each character cell stacks two board cells with half-block glyphs, which keeps the cells roughly square.

License and contributing

Licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE). Contributions are welcome; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Citation

If you use this project, please cite it. A machine-readable CITATION.cff is included; expand below for a BibTeX entry.

BibTeX

@software{Vulpes_life_2026,
  author  = {Vulpes, Aesthetic},
  title   = {life},
  year    = {2026},
  month   = jul,
  version = {0.1.0},
  url     = {https://github.com/tui-apps/life}
}

Related

Part of the tui-apps collection

Six small, single-purpose terminal apps.

App	What it does
calc	live calculator
algebra-visual	function grapher
classical-ciphers	cipher encoder and decoder
crypto-charts	crypto price charts
totp	TOTP authenticator
life	Conway's Game of Life (this repo)