[HN Gopher] Show HN: Zenta - Mindfulness for Terminal Users
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Show HN: Zenta - Mindfulness for Terminal Users
Author : ihiep
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-06-27 08:28 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| car wrote:
| Great.
|
| I only get a line animation in the MacOS terminal app, under zsh,
| it doesn't look like the description.
| ihiep wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! You're right. I haven't tested it on
| Terminal.app yet. It works well on iTerm2 and most Linux
| terminals, but I'll review it on Terminal.app soon and update
| the tool or the README to reflect compatibility. Really
| appreciate you pointing that out.
| car wrote:
| Thank you for being so responsive, and making Zenta in the
| first place! It has already allowed me to calm my mind on a
| few occasions.
|
| The cli is already so bare bones and focused, so Zenta fits
| in well.
| ihiep wrote:
| Update: Just released v0.3.1 with Terminal.app compatibility
| fixed! The tool now auto-detects your terminal and adapts
| gracefully. You'll see a beautiful progressive breathing
| animation that flows like: Inhale: * - * - *** - **** (building
| up) Exhale: **** - *** - * - * (releasing down) Try the latest
| version - it should breathe beautifully on Terminal.app now.
| Thanks for helping make mindfulness accessible to everyone!
| pizzalife wrote:
| I love this. Quick suggestion: make the width/height of the
| animation depend on your terminal size. Then you could make
| the animation a bit smoother for larger terminals.
| aftergibson wrote:
| Well that's just neat, thanks for sharing!
| ihiep wrote:
| It is only what it is. Thank you for seeing
| zipping1549 wrote:
| I always love this kind of silly tui tools. Thanks for sharing!
| shubhamintech wrote:
| no analytics, no numbers, love that!
| d--b wrote:
| Looks great, though I must say I am not a huge fan of the yoga-
| namaste-style theme. Reminds me of spas where the "relaxing"
| music is stock ambient crap.
|
| If I had more time, I'd theme it with a more rock n roll
| approach.
| ihiep wrote:
| Whether spa or rock, both return you to now.
| slowkoder wrote:
| Any plans for additional commands? I was thinking that a 'focus'
| command with a short to-do list (perhaps paired with some Stoic
| quips) could be useful in keeping one on track over the course of
| the day.
| mgb111 wrote:
| quite original, bringing mindfulness to coding good luck with it
| j4cobgarby wrote:
| This is quite nice! I found the name zenta slightly inconvenient
| to remember and type, so I renamed the executable to 'relax', but
| the help messages still say 'zenta'. As a small fix, maybe you
| can make the help messages print argv[0] as the executable name?
| ihiep wrote:
| Great idea! Just fixed this. Now when you rename zenta to
| relax, all help messages automatically show "relax" instead of
| "zenta". Available in v0.3.2. Thanks!
| tomhow wrote:
| [stub]
| abhisek wrote:
| I experienced mindfulness when I moved to i3wm.
| piepiemumu wrote:
| Nice! Would be cool if implemented also as a progress bar.. :)
| ashlance wrote:
| Thanks for this. We need more of this kind of energy in the
| world.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Great job!
|
| I was looking for an app/cli that lets me adjust breathing
| patterns on the fly (think of extending the hold duration for
| 0.5s and a while after for instance extend the outbreathe
| duration 1s, while having my eyes closed using my bluetooth
| controller). Finding something like this on any app store with
| its thousands of bloated apps seems quite hopeless and it's a
| relatively simple feature. Can I hope for your kindness to
| implement something like that?
|
| (I'm using 8bitdo controller and mapping of buttons is possible
| via keyd, so no need for adding configurations, any key combo
| would do).
|
| I'm also happy for anyone else pointing me to a solution.
|
| Keep on doing good!
|
| (Happy to follow your repo if I can hope for this feature. No
| worries, I'm a patient man.)
| ihiep wrote:
| Beautiful idea! I'll explore how to let the breath respond to
| your keys.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Where do I put my OpenAi key though or are you saying this
| doesn't even need a LLM :) /s
| ihiep wrote:
| Runs offline. Powered by consciousness. :)
| nathell wrote:
| Thumbs up for the philosophy. This is the way.
| five9s wrote:
| Pretty cool. Have you thought about auto triggering a need for a
| breath at certain intervals?
| ihiep wrote:
| The best breath is the one you notice, not the one you're told
| to take.
| set5think wrote:
| This is elegant and tasteful in all the right ways. Really nice
| work!
| justusthane wrote:
| Really neat! Some feedback: it seems Zenta looks at $TERM to
| determine whether or not to use "simple" mode, and it seems it
| might be overly conservative.
|
| I'm a tmux user, and in tmux, $TERM must be "screen-256color" or
| "tmux-256color". With $TERM set to either of those, zenta uses
| simple mode.
|
| I can get it to use "full" mode by running it as
| "TERM=xterm-256color zenta" within tmux and it works fine, but
| this shouldn't be necessary - I haven't run into any other TUI
| apps that don't work properly in tmux.
|
| _Edit_ : I just noticed in the README that it seems to be
| intentional that it uses simple mode in tmux, but I'm not sure
| why that should be the case, since it clearly works fine. Maybe
| you could use simple mode for $TERM=screen and normal mode for
| $TERM=tmux?
|
| On a different note, it seems like it would be more immersive if
| it took over the entire terminal window while running. Maybe
| you've already considered that and decided not to.
|
| Anyway, thanks again! I love this.
| arp242 wrote:
| I added a --complex flag so it's easier to use the complex
| animations on tmux: https://github.com/e6a5/zenta/pull/5
|
| But yeah, I agree - I think this might be rather too
| conservative.
| justusthane wrote:
| I just installed the newest version (released 21 minutes
| ago!) and it works perfectly now. Thanks to both of you! The
| magic of open source :)
| ihiep wrote:
| Thank you both for this feedback! You're right. I made a
| mistake by not testing thoroughly enough. I was being overly
| conservative based on assumptions rather than actual testing.
| Your detailed feedback about $TERM values and real-world tmux
| usage is exactly what I needed. I should have tested more
| environments before making assumptions about terminal
| compatibility. Thanks for keeping me honest and helping improve
| Zenta!
| justusthane wrote:
| No problem, you can't test everything!
| neiesc wrote:
| https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?K=zenta
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