rayterm is a ray-tracer that renders its output to a terminal. The only dependencies are notcurses and SDL3---both optional.
- Written in C23
- Real-time path tracing on the terminal
- Supports ASCII (monochrome/colored/matrix) and UTF-8 block output
- Atmospheric scattering
- Supported primitives: planes, spheres
- Supported materials: emissive, diffuse, metallic, dielectric, checkerboard
- Supported lights: directional, point
- First-person camera
- Keyboard support via notcurses
- Joystick support via SDL3
- Custom allocator support
- Callback-based error-handling
Install git, premake and the dependencies.
Then:
git clone https://github.com/0xdeadf1sh/rayterm
cd rayterm
premake5 gmake # this is for linux; see platform-specific instructions in premake's documentation
make -C build config=release
Now you may run the shapes demo:
./build/release/shapes_notcurses
Enjoy!
rayterm: a ray-tracer with a tui
Copyright (C) 2026 0xdeadf1.sh
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.