Simulate John Conway's Game of Life in your terminal. Interface is powered by tcell.

• Supports the standard Game of Life rules as well as other variations such as HighLife, Amoeba, and others (see rules).
• It can simulate preset patterns in the RLE, Life 1.06, or Plaintext formats (thanks to life).
• Supports simulation speed increment of decrement.
• Supports stepping through the simulation, one generation at a time.
• Supports themes (limited for now).

If you have Go installed, you can use the following command to install Golife:

$ go get github.com/ayoisaiah/golife/cmd/...

Alternatively, precompiled binaries are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS here (only for amd64).

Basic usage:

$ golife

See demo

RLE, Life 1.06 and Plaintext patterns are supported by Golife. For example, here's a huge list of Game of Life patterns in the RLE format.

You can load a preset pattern from a file (example):

$ golife --file gosperglidergun.cells

See demo

Or you can load a preset pattern from a URL:

$ golife --url "http://copy.sh/life/examples/spider.rle" --input-format rle

See demo

The default Game of Life rules are as follows:

• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours survives.
• Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
• All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.

However, Golife supports other variants as well. You can list them all using the following command:

$ golife rules
Default:
Survives: [2 3], Born: [3]

DayAndNight:
Survives: [3 5 6 7 8], Born: [3 6 7 8]

Coral:
Survives: [4 5 6 7 8], Born: [3]

2x2:
Survives: [1 2 5], Born: [3 6]

34Life:
Survives: [3 4], Born: [3 4]

Amoeba:
Survives: [1 3 5 8], Born: [3 5 7]

Assimilation:
Survives: [4 5 6 7], Born: [3 4 5]
...

Select a rule:

$ golife --rule Amoeba

See demo

List available themes.

$ golife themes
WhiteOnBlack
BlackOnWhite

Select a theme:

$ golife --theme BlackOnWhite

See demo

$ golife --help

Golife relies heavily on other open source software listed below:

• urfave/cli
• gdamore/tcell
• ayoisaiah/life

Bug reports, or pull requests are much welcome!

Created by Ayooluwa Isaiah and released under the terms of the MIT Licence.