Twilight falls at 0.10. Every other style in the app runs at 0.20 or above, and most sit at 0.30.
That single number is what the style is.
At a third of the usual speed the rain stops reading as data moving past and starts reading as light changing. Which is what the name is about, and it is the only style here tuned toward atmosphere rather than legibility.
A sunset, not a phosphor
The palette has four stops and none of them are green. It runs deep navy through a darker blue into magenta, then finishes in yellow at the top of the brightness range.
That is a sky at dusk read bottom to top, and it behaves differently from the other ramps here. Most styles put their brightest color at the leading edge of a string and let the trail decay through the same hue. Twilight's trail changes hue as it fades, so a single string runs yellow to magenta to blue over its length.
Bloom sits at 0.10, the lowest in the app, because a hue-shifting trail is doing the work that glow does elsewhere.
The only style with a fixed glyph size
Twilight is the one preset that sets an explicit 16 point glyph size rather than deriving it from the column pitch. Combined with 50 columns, that produces a deliberately looser field than the automatic sizing would give.
The numbers, if you want to check them
| Setting | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Rain model | layered | Three depth planes |
| Columns | 50 | Grid width |
| Fall speed | 0.10 | Slowest in the app by a factor of two |
| Glyph size | 16 pt | The only preset with an explicit size rather than derived |
| Bloom | 0.10 | Lowest in the app |
| High pass | 0.00 | What little glow there is applies broadly |
| Raindrop length | 0.90 | Long trails, which the hue shift needs |
| Cursor color | #FFFF99 | Pale yellow |
| Cursor intensity | 1.50 | Softest cursor in the app |
The palette
Four stops. Follow it left to right and it is a sunset.
The glyph file
Huberfish D is the sibling of the sheet Palimpsest uses. Same source, same license chain, a different set of shapes.
Slices 34
Bytes 557,056
SHA-256 6cf89a9fce12142343e099863983ac9222a72debc36663720e7b5d61a8676916
Source Rezmason/matrix huberfish_d_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
Which Matrix Desktop preset is the slowest?
Twilight, at a fall speed of 0.10. Most presets run at 0.30 and the next slowest is Neo at 0.20.
Why does the Twilight rain change color down a string?
Its four palette stops move through different hues rather than one hue at different brightnesses, so a trail shifts from yellow through magenta to blue as it decays.
Do Twilight and Palimpsest use the same characters?
No, but they come from the same source. Twilight draws Huberfish D and Palimpsest draws Huberfish A, two sheets from the same typeface, each 34 glyphs.
Slow enough to watch
Every other style in this app is built to look like information moving.
This one is built to look like the light going.