A palimpsest is a manuscript that was scraped clean and written over, with the older text still showing through. This style is built as one, and it is the only style in the app where the rain is darker than what it falls on.
The palette runs backwards
Every other style maps dark cells to black and bright cells to a light color. Palimpsest maps dark cells to a warm parchment cream and bright cells to a deep navy.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: the background is the bright end of the ramp, and the rain is the dark end. Characters do not glow onto a black field. They stain a pale one.
Bloom drops to 0.20, nearly off, because there is nothing to bloom. Cursor isolation is disabled for the same reason; a hot leader has no meaning when the field is already light.
A different alphabet
Huberfish is not katakana. It is a font Teague Chrystie made, published with the line "feel free to use it for whatever!!", and it gives this style a script that looks like writing without being any writing you can read.
Earlier releases tilted the whole field 11.25 degrees. 1.5.1 removed the slant along with every other per-style effect; the alphabet and the inverted palette carry the identity on their own.
At 40 columns the glyphs are the largest in the app, tied with Megacity. That is deliberate: an unfamiliar alphabet needs size to read as script rather than texture.
The numbers, if you want to check them
| Setting | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Rain model | layered | Three depth planes |
| Columns | 40 | Largest glyphs in the app, tied with Megacity |
| Bloom | 0.20 | Nearly off. There is no dark field to glow against |
| Cursor isolation | off | A hot leader has no meaning on a light field |
| Raindrop length | 1.20 | Long trails |
| Animation speed | 0.75 | Slowed in 1.5.1 |
| Cycle speed | 0.005 | The slowest glyph mutation in the app: a cell changes about every 4.4 seconds |
| Fall speed | 0.50 | Faster than the 0.30 most styles use |
| Cycle frame skip | 3 | Mutation evaluated every third frame |
The palette
Two stops, and note the direction. The left end of this strip is what you see most of.
The glyph file
This is one of only two families in the app derived from upstream artwork rather than generated clean-room. The chain is recorded: Rezmason's MSDF sheet under MIT, the Huberfish typeface under its author's public grant, and the full notice ships inside the app in Third Party Notices.
Slices 34
Bytes 557,056
SHA-256 105bc791895d5a9454c0ca2abc8b467d2f213484de7866e5cc91a3895919387a
Source Rezmason/matrix huberfish_a_msdf.png, MIT, commit 5ba9049
Typeface Huberfish by Teague Chrystie, public grant recorded in the app repo
Rebuild swift scripts/generate-huberfish-coverage.swift
On your display
This style renders natively at 3840 by 2160 and 5120 by 2880. The glyph atlas picks its mip level from the real backing scale, so characters stay sharp on a 5K panel instead of going soft.
Refresh rate is handled separately from simulation rate. The rain advances on its own fixed schedule and the shader interpolates between the current state and the previous one at presentation time, so a 120 Hz display gets 120 smooth frames without the rain running faster. On battery or under thermal pressure the app drops to 30 or 15 fps and turns bloom off.
Common questions
Why is the Palimpsest rain dark instead of glowing?
Its palette is inverted. Dark cells map to a parchment cream and bright cells to deep navy, so the background is the light end of the ramp and the characters stain it rather than glow on it.
What alphabet does Palimpsest use?
Huberfish A, a 34 glyph family from a typeface by Teague Chrystie, published with an explicit grant to use it freely. It is not katakana and is not meant to be readable.
What inspired the Palimpsest preset?
The upstream project describes it as inspired by the art and sound of Rob Dougan's Furious Angels, a track associated with the first film.
Scraped and written over
The name is a manuscript that was cleaned off and reused, with the first text still bleeding through the second.
Every other style writes light onto darkness. This one writes darkness back onto the page.