Wake up, Neo

2006-04-16 (updated July 2026)

When I was a kid, I was trying to understand hacking in all its forms.

Back then, the forums mixed technical curiosity, idiotic challenges, well-made tutorials, and frankly dubious practices.

There were disclaimers to explain the rules of each team, methods to attack an email inbox, trojans to install on friends' computers, and a lot of noise around all of this.

It wasn't always very clever.

But it's also how I learned some of the basics of computing.

By tinkering.

By breaking things.

By trying to understand why they broke.

And a very good example is the famous "Wake up, Neo" from The Matrix.

The idea was simple: to reproduce that cult scene in a terminal where the screen wakes up by itself and slowly displays:

Wake up, Neo The Matrix has you Follow the white rabbit Knock, knock, Neo

An image speaks better:

One morning, while I was working on a Debian server with PuTTY, I wanted to revive that old idea.

The main goal was to create a small animated effect. Erase the screen, write each phrase character by character, wait a moment, and then move to the next.

Nothing very useful.

So obviously indispensable.

Current version of the script

The original script mixed sh and Bash, and some characters were broken by the WordPress import.

Here is a working version:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

type_slowly() {
  local text="$1"
  local pause_after="$2"
  local pause_clear="$3"
  local i

  printf '\n'

  for ((i = 0; i < ${#text}; i++)); do
    printf '%s' "${text:i:1}"
    sleep 0.1
  done

  sleep "$pause_after"
  clear
  sleep "$pause_clear"
}

matrix() {
  clear
  type_slowly "Wake up, Neo..." 2 1
  type_slowly "The Matrix has you" 3 1
  type_slowly "Follow the white rabbit." 2 2
  type_slowly "Knock, knock, Neo." 4 3
}

matrix

Save it to a file:

wake-up-neo.sh

Make it executable:

chmod +x wake-up-neo.sh

Then run it:

./wake-up-neo.sh

The script works with Bash on Linux and macOS.

What I keep from that old text

What interests me today is not really the script.

It's the method.

Seeing something in a movie.

Wondering how to reproduce it.

Searching.

Testing.

Writing a few lines.

And learning along the way.

Many of my projects started like this.

Not with a grand plan.

Just with an idea that was a bit useless that absolutely had to work.