Fake Hacker Terminal
Four terminal themes, a real per-character typewriter, and matrix rain that actually falls at different speeds.
For parody, education, and mockups only
Ignored if you paste your own text below.
42 chars/sec
One line at a time. Blank lines are kept, so you can space the output out.
Restarts from the top when the script finishes.
Every command, host and address in the built-in scripts is invented. Escape exits fullscreen at any time.
Everything here runs on your device. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.
A fullscreen terminal that types by the character, in four themes, with output you can replace entirely. Escape exits immediately.
How to use it
- Pick a theme. Matrix rain adds falling glyphs behind the text; the other three are flat terminal palettes.
- Choose a built-in script, or paste your own lines into the custom box.
- Set the typing speed. The default of 42 characters a second reads as a fast typist.
- Press Start. Press Escape whenever you want out.
Typing speed is not the thing that makes it convincing
The obvious approach is to reveal a whole line every few hundred milliseconds. It is easy, and it looks like a slideshow, because nothing on a real terminal appears all at once.
Typing character by character fixes half of it. The other half is the pause at the end of each line. A terminal that types continuously, with no breath between one command and the next, reads as a text file being dumped rather than a person working. This tool holds for a moment at the end of every line before starting the next one, and that gap does more for believability than the speed does.
The typewriter is also written as a pure function of elapsed time rather than an index that increments each frame. That sounds like an implementation detail and it has a visible consequence: when you switch tabs, the animation pauses to save battery, and on return it picks up at the right position instead of jumping backwards to wherever the counter got to.
The matrix rain, specifically
Three things separate falling glyphs that look right from falling glyphs that look like a screensaver.
Columns must run at different speeds. A grid descending in lockstep is a wall, not rain. Each column here draws its own speed from a seeded generator, so the pattern is reproducible but never uniform.
Glyphs must change while they fall. A character that stays fixed for its whole descent turns each column into a scrolling string. Here every cell picks its glyph from its own position and the current tick, so the whole field churns continuously.
Trails must vary in length, and each column keeps its own. That is what gives the effect depth: some streams are long and faint, others are short and bright.
The glyph set is half-width katakana plus digits and a few operators, which is the character range the effect is known for and one a monospace fallback font will actually have.
What it does not do
It cannot hide the browser chrome on iPhone, because Safari there has no Fullscreen API at all — the fallback is a fixed full-viewport overlay and the hint text says so rather than leaving you wondering why it looks wrong. It cannot access your filesystem, your network, or anything else, because it is a canvas drawing coloured shapes in a tab.
The built-in scripts are set dressing. They name no real host, no real credential, and no real technique, and the addresses in them are drawn only from the documentation ranges reserved for exactly this purpose.
Theme reference
| Theme | Background | Text | Rain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phosphor green | #04140a | #31e06a | No |
| Amber CRT | #150c02 | #ffb000 | No |
| Matrix rain | #000000 | #00ff41 | Yes |
| Ice blue | #03101c | #4fc3f7 | No |
Speed reference
| Setting | Reads as |
|---|---|
| 12 chars/sec | A slow, deliberate typist |
| 42 chars/sec | Fast human typing (default) |
| 80 chars/sec | Scripted output |
| 160 chars/sec | A machine dumping a log |
Questions
How do I get out of it?
Press Escape. That is bound before the screen ever appears, and it works whether the browser granted true fullscreen or fell back to a fixed overlay. The Exit button in the top corner does the same thing if there is no keyboard to hand.
Can I make it type my own text?
Yes. Paste anything into the custom script box and it replaces the built-in output entirely, one line at a time, at whatever speed you set. Blank lines are kept, so you can space the output out.
Is any of the output real?
None of it. Every command, hostname and address is invented, and the only IP addresses used are from the ranges reserved for documentation and private networks so they cannot resolve to anyone. Nothing here describes a real technique or touches a real system.
Why does the matrix rain look different from other versions?
Because each column runs at its own speed and each glyph changes while it falls. Most versions drop a grid of identical characters at one uniform rate, which is the immediate giveaway. Here every column gets its own speed and trail length from a seeded generator.
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