CLI Of Life

Play Conway's Game of Life in your terminal!

Installation

Docker

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A Docker image is available at ghcr.io/gabe565/cli-of-life

sudo docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/gabe565/cli-of-life

Homebrew (macOS, Linux)

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Install cli-of-life from gabe565/homebrew-tap:

brew install gabe565/tap/cli-of-life

APT (Ubuntu, Debian)

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1. If you don't have it already, install the ca-certificates package

   sudo apt install ca-certificates

2. Add gabe565 apt repository

   echo 'deb [trusted=yes] https://apt.gabe565.com /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gabe565.list
   

3. Update apt repositories

   sudo apt update

4. Install cli-of-life

   sudo apt install cli-of-life

RPM (CentOS, RHEL)

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1. If you don't have it already, install the ca-certificates package

   sudo dnf install ca-certificates

2. Add gabe565 rpm repository to /etc/yum.repos.d/gabe565.repo

   [gabe565]
   name=gabe565
   baseurl=https://rpm.gabe565.com
   enabled=1
   gpgcheck=0

3. Install cli-of-life

   sudo dnf install cli-of-life

AUR (Arch Linux)

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Install cli-of-life-bin with your AUR helper of choice.

Manual Installation

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Download and run the latest release binary for your system and architecture.

Usage

Run cli-of-life in a terminal to play.

By default, the grid will be empty, but rle/plaintext files can be loaded with cli-of-life FILE.rle or cli-of-life https://...

For full command-line reference, see docs.

Examples

$ cli-of-life https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Gosper_glider_gun
$ cli-of-life https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Twin_bees_shuttle
$ cli-of-life https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Breeder_1
$ cli-of-life https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Replicator

See the LifeWiki for pattern files.

Keybinds

Key	Description
mouse	Place cells
space	Play/pause
m	Toggle between modes: smart, place, erase
wasd	Move the game board
-/+	Zoom
</>	Change playback speed
esc	Toggle menu
t	Tick
ctrl+c	Quit

References

• LifeWiki
• An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time by Tomas G. Rokicki (GitHub Mirror)
• Conway's Game of Life Blog Series by Eric Lippert
• noctilu/quadtree
• HashLife by ninguem
• An implementation of Hashlife in Python by John H Williamson
• rowett/lifeviewer