Make your terminal snow with python

snowjob.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import random
import time
import platform

snowflakes = {}

try:
    # Windows Support
    from colorama import init
    init()
except ImportError:
    pass

def get_terminal_size():
    def ioctl_GWINSZ(fd):
        try:
            import fcntl
            import termios
            import struct
            cr = struct.unpack('hh', fcntl.ioctl(fd, termios.TIOCGWINSZ,
        '1234'))
        except:
            return None
        return cr

    cr = ioctl_GWINSZ(0) or ioctl_GWINSZ(1) or ioctl_GWINSZ(2)

    if not cr:
        try:
            fd = os.open(os.ctermid(), os.O_RDONLY)
            cr = ioctl_GWINSZ(fd)
            os.close(fd)
        except:
            pass
    if not cr:
        try:
            cr = (os.environ['LINES'], os.environ['COLUMNS'])
        except:
            cr = (25, 80)
    return int(cr[1]), int(cr[0])

columns, rows = get_terminal_size()

def clear_screen(numlines=100):
    """Clear the console.

    numlines is an optional argument used only as a fall-back.
    """
    if os.name == "posix":
        # Unix/Linux/MacOS/BSD/etc
        os.system('clear')
    elif os.name in ("nt", "dos", "ce"):
        # DOS/Windows
        os.system('cls')
    else:
        # Fallback for other operating systems.
        print('\n' * rows)

def get_random_flake():
    if not platform.system() == 'Windows':
        try:
            # python3 support
            try:
                cmd = unichr
            except NameError:
                cmd = chr

            flake = cmd(random.choice(range(0x2740, 0x2749)))

            return flake
        except:
            pass

    return " *"

def move_flake(col):
    if snowflakes[col][0]+1 == rows:
        snowflakes[col] = [1, get_random_flake()]
    else:
        print("\033[%s;%sH  " % (snowflakes[col][0], col))

        snowflakes[col][0] += 1

        print("\033[%s;%sH%s" % (snowflakes[col][0], col, snowflakes[col][1]))

        print("\033[1;1H")

if __name__ == "__main__":

    clear_screen()

    while True:
        col = random.choice(range(1, int(columns)))

        # its already on the screen, move it
        if col in snowflakes.keys():
            move_flake(col)
        else:
        # otherwise put it on the screen
            flake = get_random_flake()
            snowflakes[col] = [1, flake]

            print("\033[%s;%sH%s" % (snowflakes[col][0], col,
                    snowflakes[col][1]))

        # key any flakes on the screen moving
        for flake in snowflakes.keys():
            move_flake(flake)

        time.sleep(0.1)

This latest version gives you random snowflakes, if your terminal doesn't support the characters drop to the old version that uses * or modify get_random_flake to always return *

It now supports python3 and windows (hopefully)

This is neat :) I forked it and added varying speeds to the snow flakes to give it a pseudo-parallax effect.

Awesome, yours looks really nice

Wasn't working for me at first, kept getting stuff like:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "snowjob.py", line 107, in
snowflakes[col][1]))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2747' in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

I forced 80x25 screen size on SL4A, replaced get_random_flake() with

def get_random_flake():
    return "*"

and this runs on Android. Thank you!

Very good and very nice looking. I couldn't get it to run without problems on the windows console (Python 2.7) but on Cygwin it works like a charm.

Merry Christmas!

Works like a charm py3k @ win64. :)

Doesn't work in either py3.2.1 or py 2.7 in Windows for me. I've tried a number of character sets, all I get is output like this:

[5;69H
[6;69H *
[1;1H
[14;71H
[15;71H *
[1;1H

It IS animated, though.... :)

That's neat man, I love it.

@tensigh you need to install colorama for it to work in windows

Beautiful! Nice little script mate :)