G33kShell

G33kShell is a cross-platform retro-themed desktop shell that wraps a CRT aesthetic around a custom command experience.

Highlights

• Boot-up BIOS prelude, login theatrics, and optional webcam face detection.
• Powered by Avalonia on .NET for cross-platform hardware-accelerated rendering with crisp pixel fonts and shader-based scanlines.
• Extensive built-in command set spanning navigation, search, system info, automation, and novelty utilities.
• Inline man pages, persistent history, and settings that remember your favorite skins, screensavers, and working directories.
• Skin system with RetroPlasma, RetroGreenDos, RetroMonoDos, and SimpleSkin.
• Idle timeout hands ownership to animated ASCII and pixel-art screensavers — many driven by AI brains you can train live.

Built-in Commands

• Navigate your filesystem with dir, tree, cd, pushd, popd, paths, and location.
• Inspect and manipulate files via cat, tail, copy, rm, mkdir, find, grep, whereis, and open.
• Integrate with the OS using reveal, space, clip, now, ver, worktime, shutdown, and max.
• Customize the experience with skin, screensaver, man, help, history, and the CP437 ASCII table.

Tip: run man <command> for auto-generated manual pages, or help to see every command and alias.

Useful Command Tips

• Reuse lines from the previous command's output with $<n> (for example, cat $4).
• Copy the last command output to the clipboard with clip (use clip -n to show line numbers or clip 4 for a single line).

Screensavers

Cycle anything you like with screensaver -l and screensaver <name> - add _train to the AI-powered ones to watch them learn in real time.

Screensaver	Description
asciiroids	AI Asteroids in ASCII; add _train to teach it.
boids	Flocking boids orbit a wandering sphere.
bounce	Breakout-style brick field with ricocheting faces.
clock	Big retro clock for the night shift.
conway	Conway's Game of Life, always plotting.
crystal	Growing crystal shard in chunky pixels.
cube	Spinning 3D wireframe cube.
defrag	Disk defrag blocks click into place.
donut	The classic spinning ASCII torus.
earth	Rotating ASCII Earth, tiny and proud.
fire	Flickering fire buffer, CRT cozy.
fluid	Low-res fluid sim, surprisingly hypnotic.
heist	Your last screen gets stolen, then returned.
lemmings	Tiny lemmings on an endless march.
mandelbrot	Mandelbrot zooms in chunky characters.
matrix	Matrix-style code rain.
neo	Matrix corridor with glowing trails.
plasma	Old-school plasma waves.
pong	AI pong duel; add _train to coach it.
sand	Sand pours over your last screen and settles.
scroller	Retro text scroller for demo vibes.
snake	AI snake that learns; add _train.
stars	Warp-speed starfield.
swirl	Hypnotic swirl patterns.
tbibm	The British IBM tribute with Friday-night swagger.
terminator	Pixelated Terminator portrait.
tiefighter	3D Tie Fighter flyby.
tron	Light-cycle trails with a tracking camera.
tunnel	Endless ASCII tunnel run.
twister	Column twist effect.
willy	Miner Willy marches across the screen.
worms	Glowing worms wriggle across the grid.
xenon	Xenon 2 shopkeeper cameo.

AI-enabled screensavers (asciiroids, pong, snake) store their trained neural weights between runs so you can pick up right where your last session left off.

Quick Start

• Install the .NET 8 SDK.
• Clone the repo and restore dependencies: dotnet restore.
• Launch the desktop shell: dotnet run --project G33kShell.Desktop.

The application persists settings (skin, screensaver, path history, trained brains) under your user profile. Delete the settings file if you ever want a clean slate.

Development Notes

• Run the unit suite with dotnet test from the repo root.
• Avalonia assets live under G33kShell.Desktop/Assets; screensavers under G33kShell.Desktop/Console/Screensavers.
• To build your own screensaver, implement IScreensaver, expose a unique Name, and drop the class into the screensavers folder — screensaver -l will pick it up automatically.

License

MIT © Dean Edis. See LICENSE for details.