no-more-secrets

What it is

no-more-secrets recreates the iconic “decryption reveal” effect from the 1992 movie Sneakers: text on screen first appears as a wall of random characters, then progressively resolves to its real content — column by column, each character flickering through random replacements before snapping to its final value. The project ships as a standalone command nms (pipe any text through it) and as a C library libnms that any other program can link against. Pure ANSI escape sequences, no curses dependency.

For KN-86 this is a candidate signature transition / splash effect — the kind of distinctive single-purpose flourish that gives the device identity, sitting alongside AetherTune’s CRT boot/power-off animations and BOOTSTRA.386’s configurable boot animation as the third signature effect in KN-86’s identity-branding stack.

Key takeaways for KN-86

• The Sneakers reveal as a sanctioned transition effect. Decryption-style reveal — random characters flickering down to the real text — is a tight, instantly-readable visual idiom. For KN-86 the natural uses are:
  • CIPHER fragment reveal on the CIPHER-LINE OLED when a new fragment lands (“decrypts” into view from a wall of random characters)
  • Mission contract acceptance — the contract title and parameters reveal one character at a time when the operator confirms accept
  • TERM-line response of certain verbs — DECRYPT or INTERROGATE or ANALYZE verbs reveal their output in this style as a built-in aesthetic flourish
• Pure ANSI, no dependencies. Means KN-86 can implement the same effect in nOSh runtime code without pulling in any external library — the algorithm is small (cell-by-cell iterate, swap each cell through N random characters at a configurable rate, settle to the target). Worth ~50 lines of C, exposed through NoshAPI as (reveal surface :style :char-flicker :rate 30 :duration 1.0) per the canonical contract at software/api-reference/grammars/reveal-styles.md (ADR-0033). (Earlier inspiration-tier draft used the name (reveal-text x y text …) — superseded by the unified (reveal :style …) surface.)
• Configurability matters. nms exposes timing and color knobs; libnms takes the same as function parameters. KN-86’s reveal primitive should expose rate (characters per second of flicker), duration (total reveal time), and trail length (how many random characters each cell cycles through before settling). The cart author or the runtime decides the parameters per use site.
• Composes with the boot animation. BOOTSTRA.386 does the boot aesthetic; no-more-secrets does the transition aesthetic. KN-86 ships both as v0.1 affordances: the boot animation plays once on cold boot; the reveal animation is available to NoshAPI-via-cart-Lisp for any text-emit transition. Two signature flourishes in the identity vocabulary.
• Pair with the CIPHER voice style guide. The reveal animation is a delivery mechanism for CIPHER fragments; the cipher-voice-style-guide is the voice/content contract for what the revealed text says. Together they define how CIPHER lands.

License note

GPL v3. KN-86 should not vendor libnms or copy code verbatim. The reveal algorithm is small and well-understood; reimplement from first principles in KN-86’s own permissively-licensed runtime code. The reference here is technique, not source.

Image

No image downloaded — the effect is animated and a still frame doesn’t capture it. (A short captured GIF of the reveal effect would be a high-value supplementary asset; not blocking.)

Notes

• Direct cite for the v0.1 signature-effects ship list item. Reveal animation as a NoshAPI primitive — now canonical as (reveal :style :char-flicker …) per ADR-0033 and software/api-reference/grammars/reveal-styles.md. Configurable rate / duration / trail-length.
• Cross-link bootstra386.md and aethertune.md for the boot-animation siblings.
• Cross-link cipher-voice-style-guide for the voice/content contract that the reveal mechanism is the delivery for.
• Open question: does the reveal effect apply on the CIPHER-LINE OLED, the primary display, or both? Best directional guess: both, with the OLED as the high-frequency use case (every CIPHER fragment) and the primary display as the low-frequency use case (mission accept, the rare DECRYPT verb response). The reveal is fast enough at small text sizes that even the OLED’s 256×64 surface can render it pleasantly.