Matrix Rain fills the screen with columns of falling characters — mirrored katakana and digits, each stream led by a bright near-white glyph and fading to dark behind it, under a soft glow. It's built to run unattended: a backdrop for tech and gaming content, or a second monitor during a stream.
Before you start
- A dark room, or at least a screen that isn't facing a window. Most of the picture stays black, and glare washes out the fade at the tail of each stream — which is most of what makes it read as rain rather than rows of text.
- Nothing else to prepare. There's no upload, no permission prompt, and no microphone or camera access — it draws entirely on its own.
Set it up
- Open the Matrix Rain effect.
- Leave Glyph Set on Matrix (Katakana + Digits) for the look from the films.
- Set Glyph Size for your viewing distance. Smaller characters pack in more columns; larger ones are easier to pick out up close.
- Set Density for how much of the screen is raining at once, then Fall Speed for how quickly the streams drop.
- Adjust Trail Length and Glyph Flicker to taste.
- Select Play Fullscreen.
You'll know it worked when columns of characters are falling at visibly different speeds, each one led by a bright white character, with the characters behind it changing in place as they fade out.
To leave fullscreen, press Escape or move your mouse and select Exit Fullscreen.
What each control does
Every control below sits in the Effect group in the settings panel, apart from Brightness and Color, which are in Light.
| Control | Range | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph Set | 5 options | Matrix | Which characters fall. Matrix mixes katakana, digits and punctuation; Katakana Only drops the digits; Latin Code, Hexadecimal and Binary read as terminal output instead. |
| Fall Speed | 1–100 | 45 | How fast the streams drop. Each column carries its own speed offset on top of this, so raising or lowering it scales the whole field without flattening it into a single marching rank. |
| Density | 10–100 | 70 | How much of the screen is raining at once. High values leave almost no gaps between one stream finishing and the next starting in that column; low values give sparse, isolated streams against a lot of black. |
| Glyph Size | 10–36 px | 20 | The size of each character, which also decides how many columns fit across the screen. Larger characters mean fewer, wider columns. |
| Trail Length | 5–100 | 55 | How far each stream stretches behind its leading character before it fades out. Short values look like scattered sparks; long values fill columns from top to bottom. |
| Glyph Flicker | 0–100 | 40 | How often characters change after they've landed. At 0 a character is fixed once the stream passes it; higher values keep the whole field churning. |
| Glow | 0–100 | 55 | How much bloom spreads around lit characters. Low values give crisp terminal text; high values give the heavy halo of an overdriven CRT. |
| Mirrored Glyphs | on / off | On | Flips every character horizontally, as the films do. Turn it off for characters the right way round. |
| CRT Scanlines | on / off | On | Lays fine dark horizontal lines over the picture, like a tube monitor. Turning it off makes the image slightly brighter and cleaner. |
| Color | swatch | #00ff41 | Re-tints every character. The bright leading glyph and the glow are derived from this, so the whole picture stays consistent whatever you pick. |
| Brightness | 10–100 | 100 | Overall output of the screen. The dial to reach for when the effect is lighting up a dark room more than you want. |
Common setups
- Faithful to the films, on a large screen. Glyph Set Matrix, Glyph Size 18–20, Density 75–85, Fall Speed 40–50, Trail Length 55–65, Glow 55. Dense, steady, and unmistakable from across the room.
- Calm backdrop behind a talking head. Density 30–45, Fall Speed 25–35, Trail Length 35–45, Glow 30, Brightness 50–60. Sparse streams on mostly-black read as atmosphere instead of competing with you for attention.
- Terminal readout for a tech demo. Glyph Set Hexadecimal or Binary, Mirrored Glyphs off, Glyph Flicker 60–80, CRT Scanlines off, Glow 20–30. Legible, fast-churning characters that look like something is actually being computed.
- Amber or cyan monitor. Color set to an amber (
#ffb000) or cyan (#00e5ff), Glow 60–70, CRT Scanlines on. The leading glyph and glow follow the colour you pick, so it reads as a different machine rather than as green code recoloured.
Troubleshooting
Every character is an empty rectangle, or the katakana turned into Latin letters. Your device has no Japanese font. The effect measures a katakana character when it starts and switches to the Latin Code set if the font can't draw one, so empty rectangles mean that check passed but the font only partly covers the set. Pick Latin Code, Hexadecimal or Binary explicitly, or install a CJK font.
The whole picture looks grey and washed out rather than green. Glow is doing more than you want — the bloom spreads the near-white leading characters into everything near them. Bring Glow down toward 30, and turn Brightness down rather than up, since a brighter picture spreads more bloom, not less.
Characters are too small to make out from across the room. Raise Glyph Size. Because it also sets the column width, the number of columns drops as you do; raise Density afterwards if the screen then looks too empty.
The streams look like rows of static text instead of falling rain. Trail Length is long enough to fill columns top to bottom, leaving no dark gap to show the motion against. Lower it to 40 or below, or lower Density so there are visible gaps between streams.
It stutters or the fans spin up on an older laptop. Four controls change how much work each frame takes, so change them one at a time and watch which one helps on your machine: raise Glyph Size for fewer, larger columns; lower Density for fewer streams at once; lower Trail Length for shorter ones; and set Glow to 0, which skips the blur passes entirely.
The display sleeps while it's running. Nothing here keeps your screen awake. Set your operating system's screen timeout to Never while you're using it.
Next steps
For a different idle screen in the same register, Starfield gives the flying-through-space look, and 3D Pipes rebuilds the old Windows pipes screensaver.