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blak.nvim

Splash & dashboard

The splash is the first thing you see on a cold launch of Blak. It’s a 66-frame braille animation of a black hole’s accretion disc, rendered at 50×14 cells with a red-orange palette. The same animation plays on every dashboard refresh.

What you’re looking at

  • Source: extracted from the milli.nvim blackhole GIF preview, the same braille frame data milli’s milli export -t lua produces.
  • Resolution: 50 columns × 14 rows, each cell a U+2800–U+28FF braille glyph carrying 8 sub-pixels (2×4).
  • Frame rate: 80 ms per frame (~12.5 fps), 66 frames per loop (~5.3 s).
  • Color: per-row, per-character color spans (foreground only, transparent background). The palette runs from #000000 deep into the void to #ee8822 at the disc’s brightest point.

Files:

Configuration

-- ~/.config/blak/lua/blak/user.lua
return {
  ui = {
    splash = {
      enabled = true,   -- show the splash at all
      animate = true,   -- play frames; false renders frame 1 statically
      loop = true,      -- loop forever; false plays once and stops
    },
  },
}

Previewing without a cold launch

:BlakSplash

Opens the animation in a scratch buffer. Useful for tuning terminal color rendering, font choice, or letting someone watch it without restarting.

How it attaches to the dashboard

Snacks owns the dashboard buffer. Blak’s splash hooks into two Snacks events:

-- lua/blak/splash/init.lua
vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("User", {
  pattern = { "SnacksDashboardOpened", "SnacksDashboardUpdatePost" },
  callback = function() ... end,
})
  • SnacksDashboardOpened — fires once when the dashboard buffer renders. Blak finds frame 1’s anchor row and starts the timer.
  • SnacksDashboardUpdatePost — fires whenever Snacks re-renders the dashboard (resize, action toggle). Blak re-paints so its color extmarks aren’t lost.

The animation runs on a vim.uv.new_timer(), scheduled with vim.schedule_wrap, and is torn down on BufWipeout / BufDelete.

Refreshing the frames

The frame file is committed verbatim from upstream milli. To refresh:

  1. Replace lua/blak/splash/frames/blackhole.lua with the latest copy from milli.nvim/lua/milli/splashes/blackhole.lua.
  2. Don’t change anything in lua/blak/splash/init.lua — it reads the standard milli export shape (cols, rows, delays, frames, colors).

The static validation script (scripts/validate.py) checks frame structure on every CI run: frame count, row/col dimensions, that every glyph is in the braille block, and that color spans are well-formed.

Disabling completely

return {
  ui = { splash = { enabled = false } },
}

Snacks dashboard still shows; only the animated header is removed. To disable Snacks dashboard entirely, override the Snacks spec — see the Plugins guide.