manic — the manual

manic is a tiny language for making animations. You write a short text file; manic renders a smooth, glowing video. No timeline scrubbing, no keyframes by hand — you describe what’s on screen and when things happen, and the engine does the rest, deterministically.

It’s built for explainer videos — math, algorithms, data structures, or anything you can draw — and it’s designed so a non-programmer can read and write it.

The whole idea in 30 seconds

A manic file has two parts:

1. The cast — the shapes on screen (a circle, a line, some text). You give each one a name.
2. The script — what happens over time, called out by name: draw this, move that, flash it green.

title("Hello");
canvas("16:9");

circle(sun, (640, 360), 90);   // the cast: a circle named `sun`
color(sun, cyan);

show(sun, 0.6);                 // the script: fade it in over 0.6s
pulse(sun);                     // then give it a little pulse

That’s the entire model. The rest of this guide walks through the vocabulary — one small, runnable example at a time — so by the end you can storyboard a video in your head and type it out.

How to read this book

Every section has a runnable sample and a short video of it playing, so you see exactly what each word does. Copy any sample into a .manic file and:

manic yourfile.manic              # live preview window
manic yourfile.manic --record out # render to out/out.mp4

Ready? Start with your first animation →