SnakeTUI

A highly configurable snake game for your terminal, built in Rust with ratatui.

Features

• Responsive controls — direction keys move the snake immediately, ahead of the tick timer. Press an arrow three times within one tick and the snake moves three times.
• Three edge-wall modes
  • solid — the board is enclosed; hitting the border ends the game
  • none (wrap) — the snake wraps around to the opposite side
  • gaps — random border walls with gaps; gaps are generated in mirrored pairs, so wrapping through a gap always lands on an open cell
• Inner wall generation with two guarantees: every free cell stays reachable (the snake can always reach its maximum possible length), and no dead-end pockets are created that the snake could enter but never leave.
• Food, super food, and poison, each with a configurable spawn frequency and an independent time-to-live — uneaten items disappear.
• Super food grows the snake by a configurable amount and can optionally double the game speed for a configurable duration.
• Two growth modes — grow instantly on eating, or only when the eaten food reaches the tail.
• Optional pass-through-self — decide whether biting yourself is fatal.
• Fully customizable colors for every cell type (head, body, food, super food, poison, walls, background).
• Per-configuration records — your best length is tracked separately for every combination of gameplay settings and persisted across sessions.
• The last-used configuration is saved and restored on the next launch.

Installation

Prebuilt binaries

Download the archive for your platform from the releases page, extract it, and run the snaketui binary (snaketui.exe on Windows).

From source

Requires a recent stable Rust toolchain (edition 2024).

cargo install --path .
# or just run it:
cargo run --release

How to play

1. Adjust the settings in the config menu (see below), then press Enter.
2. The game waits frozen until your first direction key — that key both starts the game and makes the first move.
3. Eat food to grow. Poison and walls kill you; so does your own body unless pass-through-self is enabled.

Controls

Key	Action
↑ ↓ ← → / WASD	Move (settings menu: select / change value)
Enter	Start game / confirm
Esc / p	Pause (resume or quit to menu)
d	Reset settings to defaults (in the menu)
r	Play again with the same settings (after game over)
q	Quit

Config options

Option	Description
board width / height	Board size in cells
tick speed	Milliseconds between automatic moves
edge walls	solid (enclosed), none (wrap), or gaps (mirrored openings)
inner walls	Amount of randomly generated interior walls
food / super food / poison spawns every	Spawn interval per item type (off disables)
food / super food / poison lifetime	Seconds before an uneaten item disappears (off = forever)
growth mode	instant or when food reaches tail
pass through self	If yes, the snake can cross its own body
super food growth	Length gained from super food
super food speed boost	Duration of the 2× speed boost (off disables)
food / super food / poison icon	Glyph drawn on the board (dot, star, heart, cross, …)
colors	Per-cell-type colors (head, body, food, super food, poison, walls, background)

The board's frame shows your current length, the record for the active configuration, and the elapsed play time in its heading.

Data files

Everything lives in ~/.snaketui/:

File	Contents
config	Last-used configuration (plain key=value text)
records	Best length per gameplay-configuration combination

Colors are cosmetic and don't affect which record a game counts toward.

Development

cargo test    # wall generation invariants (mirroring, connectivity, no dead ends)
cargo build --release