TSNAKE

A beautiful, fully-featured terminal Snake game written in Rust.

Features

• Smooth gameplay with 120ms base tick rate
• Multiple control schemes: Arrow keys, WASD, and HJKL (Vim-style)
• Progressive difficulty: Speed increases every 8 food items eaten
• Persistent high scores: Top 10 scores saved locally
• Beautiful UI: Colorful theme with green snake, red food, cyan borders, and yellow score
• Game states: Main menu, pause, game over, and high scores screen
• Responsive design: Adapts to terminal size

Installation

From source

git clone https://github.com/kunalsinghdadhwal/tsnake.git
cd tsnake
cargo install --path .

From crates.io

cargo install tsnake

Usage

Simply run the binary:

tsnake

Controls

Main Menu:

• Arrow Keys / W/S / K/J: Navigate menu
• Enter / Space: Select option
• Q / Esc: Quit

In-Game:

• Arrow Keys / WASD / HJKL: Move snake
• P: Pause game
• Q / Esc: Quit to menu

Paused:

• P / Space / Enter: Resume
• Q / Esc: Quit to menu

Game Over:

• Arrow Keys / W/S / K/J: Select option
• Enter / Space: Confirm selection

Gameplay

• Eat the red hearts (❤) to grow and score points
• Each food item gives you 10 points
• Avoid running into yourself
• Avoid hitting the walls (game over!)
• Speed increases every 8 food items eaten
• Modern 2025 aesthetic with neon colors and sleek design

High Scores

High scores are automatically saved to:

• Linux/macOS: ~/.config/tsnake/highscores.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\tsnake\highscores.json

Top 10 scores are preserved with timestamp, score, and snake length.

Requirements

• Rust 2021 edition or later
• A terminal with Unicode support for best experience

Dependencies

• ratatui 0.28+ (Terminal UI framework)
• crossterm 0.28+ (Terminal manipulation)
• rand 0.8 (Random number generation)
• serde & serde_json (High score serialization)
• dirs-next (Config directory detection)
• chrono (Timestamps)

Building

Debug build

cargo build

Optimized release build

cargo build --release

Author

Kunal Singh Dadhwal