Playing snake on my MacBook Terminal
I have a MacBook Air that I use mostly for work and studying. I really like the machine, it’s light and beautiful to see, great keyboard, zsh shell… good stuff, good stuff. I though though, that I would like some great terminal games, light to run but fun when I stay overnight somewhere and I don’t have my Windows. Of couse I have Steam, as well as Epic Games, and some games installed, but I wondered if there are some good games for the terminal as there are in linux. So I searched.
All I could find was to enable Emacs and play the games there were there.
What’s Emacs? I knew it was a text editor, but I’ve never used it, so I’m not the best person to explain it. So here’s a really nice post:
I wanted to try these games so I went on. Open the Terminal (⌘ + > Terminal) and type ‘emacs’. The terminal became like this:
At this point type ESC and then x. In the lower part of the terminal appears ‘M-x’ and then type the name of the game you want to play.
There is a limited number of games. Some are more famous of others, like tetris and snake.
Pushing RETURN, the game opens. There are not really indications of how to play and that kinda sucks, but it’s not Steam, it’s acceptable. You can easily guess that you move the snake with the arrows. And there is also a nice scoreboard when you lose.
The games I tried are:
- tetris
- pong
- snake
- solitaire
- dunnet
- 5x5
For dunnet, emacs recommends to play it with the command emacs -batch -l dunnetdirectly from terminal, when you open it. You can’t do it for the other games.
These little games weren’t the discovery of the century for me, but it was a nice couple of hours. Still, they aren’t what I was looking for, it’s not like I’m gonna go to some friend’s house and say “Hey man, you wanna play some pong with me? I just happen to have the game on my Mac.”. Or maybe…
