Back in 2005 a cool terminal program for Linux called Asciiquarium was released. It drew a bunch of fish swimming around your terminal window as if it were an aquarium. That program was written in Perl and its basic fish depiction were down to the limitations of ASCII pseudo-graphics. We’ve found something a bit more up to date and far better-looking. Meet Rusty Aquarium, a colourful fish tank for your web browser. This Hotpick maintains our heart-warming tradition to promote useless yet fanciful and eyecatching programs that most people will eagerly share with their friends.
Made with Rust and Cargo, Rusty Aquarium features a selection of vibrant, tropical-style backgrounds and a nice selection of different subaqueous inhabitants. They seem to float around randomly, but you can actually control a lot of things inside the tank. Press Up to add a fish and Down to remove one, use the Left and Right arrows to switch backgrounds, and press Enter to bring the tank life to the default state. Pressing H toggles the on-screen help banner.