Matrix rain — also called digital rain or falling code — is the cascading stream of glowing green characters made famous by The Matrix films. The original effect used mirrored half-width Japanese katakana mixed with numerals, drawn brightest at the head of each falling column and fading toward the tail. This simulator recreates that look in your browser with a real-time canvas animation — no download, no install.
The on-screen code in the films is commonly matched to a phosphor-style green around #00FF41, with brighter heads near #CCFFCC on a pure black background. If you're building your own theme, grab copy-ready values from our cyberpunk & terminal color palettes.
The falling glyphs in the films are mostly mirrored half-width Japanese katakana, mixed with Western numerals and a few Latin letters. The production designer built the character set by scanning characters out of his wife's Japanese cookbooks and flipping them horizontally, which is why they look almost-but-not-quite like real katakana. This simulator offers the katakana set alongside binary, hexadecimal, and symbol modes.
The code green is usually matched to around #00FF41, a phosphor-style green, with the leading character of each column brightening towards near-white (about #CCFFCC) on pure black. Copy-ready values are on the cyberpunk colour palettes page.
Press F11 on Windows and Linux or Ctrl + Cmd + F on macOS, or click FULLSCREEN. Press H to hide the control panel first so nothing but the rain is on screen.
Effectively, yes. Fullscreen it on a second monitor and leave it running, or use a wallpaper application that accepts a web page as a source. It is a canvas animation rather than a video file, so it stays sharp at any resolution and uses no disk space.
It is a continuously animating canvas, so it does use the GPU and will affect battery life on a laptop. Lowering the column density and rain speed reduces the load noticeably. The animation also pauses when the tab is in the background, so it costs nothing while hidden.
Not on this page — but the binary rain generator accepts custom text and rains your own characters instead of 0s and 1s.
Yes. Use it in videos, streams, presentations, and signage at no cost and with no attribution required.
The page works well as a streaming or video backdrop: add it to OBS as a browser source, or fullscreen it on a second monitor as a stand-in live wallpaper. The streaming toolkit covers the exact OBS workflow. For variations on the theme, try the binary rain generator (0/1 or your own text falling), or pair it with the fake hacker terminal for a full hacker-movie setup.