FracSH is a fast, rabbit hole of a fractal explorer. It has built in Mandelbrot, Julia, Multibrot, Burning Ship, custom formulas, colored ASCII (or unicode.), BMP export (implemented by me!), and more—all in Python!
Check out demo here! Youtube
- Real-time terminal fractal rendering (Mandelbrot, Julia, Multibrot, Burning Ship, ...)
- Custom formula support (enter your own mandelbrot formulas.)
- Colored ASCII mode (for nostalgia!)
- Julia mode for any formula (experimental, 50/50 chance of working.)
- Multithreaded rendering for fast previews and BMP export (fully working, very fast for python standards.)
- Progress bars for both preview and BMP rendering (mandelbrot-8 so slow, the preview has a progress bar 🥀)
- Parameter import/export (go back to your fav location)
- Resolution prompt for BMP export (customized resolutions such as user defined resolutions, common is 1024x600 for being fast to render and clarity.)
- Multiple color palettes and coloring modes (CGA Included!)
- Keyboard controls for zoom, pan, palette, fractal, and more (Down below!)
-
Run the program:
python main.py -
Controls:
- Arrows / WASD: Pan (You can even scroll with a mouse to go up and down instead of W and S)
-
- / -: Zoom in/out
- P: Next palette
- F: Next fractal
- O: Next coloring mode
- H: Home/reset view
- B: Export BMP (with resolution prompt)
- C: Enter custom formula
- J: Toggle Julia mode
- U: Toggle ASCII mode
- Z: Export parameters
- Y: Import parameters
- Q: Quit (or CTRL-C :3)
-
Custom formulas: (im not a mathematician so i don't know much about creating my own custom formulas, but there you go! works.) When prompted, enter two comma-separated expressions for the real and imaginary parts, for example an mandelbrot set looks like this:
zx*zx-zy*zy+cx,2*zx*zy+cy -
BMP Export:
Press B, enter your wanted resolution (e.g. 1920x1080, 512x512), and wait for the progress bar to finish. (actually works!)
- Python 3.13.5 (only tested on latest version, older might work without issues.)
- blessed (
pip install blessed)
| Platform | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 11 | ✅ | Fully tested |
| Python 3.13.5 | ✅ | Recommended version |
| Raspbian | ✅ | Fully tested, Python 3.11 |
MIT License
Portions of this code were adapted from Stack Overflow posts and Wikipedia pseudocode.
See LICENSE for details.
Time spent: 5 hours programming, 7+5 hours researching.
- Wikipedia
- Very inspired and motivated by Golova.dev
- Made for TerminalCraft as LemonGravy
- Blessed library, without it, the project would be bad due to none of the other frameworks fitting my bill.