Lectrick is an esoteric programming language that makes characters do things.

Lectrick uses a monospace font internally (similar to that of your code editor).

Lectrick considers the shape and colors of characters.

Below is a list of "actions." Each action has a specific shape (some have colors too).

Consider the HORIZONTAL WIRE action below. The shape is a horizontal line. A couple characters that resemble this shape include the hyphen -, then en dash –, and the em dash —. Other characters also may exist that resemble this shape, and they will work too!!

Electricity is measured in LE.

Lectrick’s character recognition assigns the action that each character most closely resembles.

That means that if a new action is added, and this action more closely resembles a character than the previous action, the character will now perform the new action..

Thus, before updating, you should generate an action map with the map command. After updating, generate another action map, and compare the two maps to see if any characters have changed actions..

Some characters are wider than others. Lectrick does not account for this. You must ensure that the characters you use form a perfect grid. The map command can help you visualize this.

Another tool is the watch command. In Jetbrains IDEs, the editor allows for variable width characters, but the terminal does not. So, if you use the watch command, you can see how Lectrick interprets the characters from the terminal while you edit the file in the editor..

Careful! If you connect two sources of power together, they will set on fire, causing an error!

Check out one-way actions to prevent this.

Outputs hello.

Outputs all characters from 255 to 0, looping back to 255 after reaching 0.

Outputs a character every second, unless the user presses a key, in which case it outputs nothing (it is quiet).

Prints the key pressed by the user.

These images are generated from sample characters that resemble the action. These sample characters are not the only characters that will work with the action..

Think about what characters resemble the shape you see in the image, and try them out!

The characters are stretched to fit the shape. This is to account for similar characters that have different widths or heights..

Electricity flows horizontally.

Electricity flows vertically.

Electricity input in one direction flows out the other three directions, split evenly.

Electricity flows out in all directions. 255 LE is split evenly between the four directions.

When electricity flows into a light block, a character is printed. The character is determined by the amount of LE.

Restricts flow in one direction.

If flow is currently being restricted, the excess power will be output vertically or discarded.

This can act as a form of error handling, as colliding power results in a fire.

Any electricity flowing into a split will be divided or multiplied by 2.

This does not split/double the electricity evenly between outputs: it just performs the operation mathematically and outputs the result in all three directions..

Increase or decrease the amount of electricity recieved, and broadcast the new value in the 3 other directions.

If the value goes below 0 or above 255, it will be overflow, wrapping around to 255 or 0 respectively.

Electricity flows horizontally only if the wire also receives vertical electricity (top or bottom) that turn.

Electricity flows out of a press detector when the user presses a key. The amount of electricity output depends on the key pressed..

Electricity greater than 0 LE will not be output, and electricity equal to 0 LE will be output as 255 LE.

Note that electricity is output in both horizontal directions, so you may want to pair this with a one-way wire to prevent it from starting a fire..

A clock outputs electricity every second.

This infinite power source outputs 255 LE every turn. The POWER SOURCE only outputs 255 LE once, and then it stops.

Before running, make sure you have uv installed. If you have Python, grab it with:

pip install uv

uv run main run file>gt;

Add --visualize to visualize the program as it runs. You’ll probably want to adjust the size of tile names with --visualize-width ;n> (default is 10). Then you’ll want to add a pause with --pause ds>.

For the visualization to work well, your terminal should support ANSI escape codes. Yellow tiles are currently dealing with electricity, red tiles have received electricity (will handle next turn), and the rest are not currently handling electricity.y.

Note that --pause pauses 3 times per turn.

Generate a map of the actions in a file. This is useful to visualize the actions and characters in a file.

uv run main map file>gt;

Check what action matches a character:

uv run main lookup "er>"

Add the --generate-overlays flag to generate images in the overlays directory. This is useful to visualize why a character is not working as expected..

Check what characters match an action:

uv run main reverse-lookup "on>"

Use the --char-range ge> to specify a range of characters to search through (like --char-range 32-126 for all printable characters or --char-range 1000 for the first 1000 characters).

--min-strength th> can be used to specify a minimum strength for the action. This is useful for actions that have a lot of similar characters..

This command generates shapes for each tile. It is neccessary for the comparison of characters to actions, and it also generates the SVGs used in the documentation..

uv run main generate-shapes

Convert between characters and their ordinal values.

uv run main chr ordinal>gt;
uv run main ord  character>gt;

Watch a file for changes and print it’s contents.

Note: This command does not actually run the program.

uv run main watch file>gt;