Rain

A curtain of falling glyphs, each column its own drop — speed, trail length, and the gap before the next one all varying so nothing reads as an obvious loop. The default glyph is original: a short procedural walk of angular strokes on a 5×5 grid, not any one studio’s typeface. Five colours, four glyph sets, either direction, and a seed that keeps two screens in the same rain.

Live demo →Setup Put it on a screen

Rain in the default green-on-black theme: columns of falling angular rune-like glyphs, most dim mid-trail and a few bright white heads. — Green, runesThe default: original procedural glyphs, falling.

Rain in amber with the latin glyph set: columns of falling uppercase and lowercase letters in amber, denser than the default. — Amber, latinA different colour and a different glyph set.

About the glyphs

The falling-columns genre is old and generic; a specific studio’s exact glyph design is not. Rain’s default set is an original procedural glyph — each one a pure function of a numeric id, nothing traced or adapted from any existing typeface or film asset. Latin, digit, and mixed sets are the alternative, in a self-hosted open-source monospace.

Where it runs

Self-hosted, read-only container. Rain makes no outbound request of any kind — there is no data source, just the URL’s own configuration computed in the browser.

What it wants

A colour, a density, a direction, and optionally a seed — two screens given the same seed and configuration fall in step, computing the same math from the same wall clock rather than sharing frames.

Setup

Put Rain on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — Plash and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install

Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

via Plash

Install Plash from the Mac App Store — it renders any web page as your desktop wallpaper.
Menu bar icon → Open URL… and paste the display’s address.
Leave Browsing Mode off so clicks pass through to your desktop as normal.
Plash reloads on wake, so it recovers on its own after sleep.

sindresorhus.com/plash →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk

On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.

fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at rain.livingkiosk.com/setup.

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`color`	green	`amber`, `cyan`, `white`, `red`, or a `#hex` value.
`speed`	1	Fall-speed multiplier, 0.2–3.
`density`	0.96	Fraction of columns raining, per layer, 0.15–1.
`trail`	28	Base trail length in cells, 4–80.
`glyphset`	runes	`latin`, `digits`, or `mixed`. `runes` is Rain’s original procedural glyph.
`direction`	down	`up` for the same rain, rising.
`bg`	dark	`light` or a `#hex` ground colour.
`seed`	—	Pins the column layout and glyph choices so two screens match.
`dim`	0	Black scrim over everything, `0` to `0.8` (fleet-wide convention).

Rain is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command — the repositories go public at launch.