My Man Image

If you've ever wanted to chomp ghosts without leaving your terminal, MyMan is the game for you. It's a faithful text-mode recreation of Namco's classic Pac-Man, running entirely in your console using curses — no GUI required.

What is MyMan?

MyMan is an open source, MIT-licensed terminal game written in C. It brings the full Pac-Man experience — dots, power pellets, ghosts, and mazes — to color and monochrome text terminals. It earned a SourceForge Community Choice badge after crossing 10,000 downloads, which speaks to how much terminal gaming enthusiasts have embraced it.

Beyond being a fun game, MyMan is impressively portable. It supports an extensive list of display backends:

  • curses/ncurses — the standard terminal UI library on Linux/macOS
  • PDcurses / XCurses — Windows and X11 variants
  • aalib / libcaca — ASCII art rendering libraries
  • Allegro / GGI — graphical backends
  • Carbon — native macOS output
  • Win32 console, VMS console, and more

This means MyMan can run almost anywhere you can get a shell.

Gameplay

The rules are classic Pac-Man:

  • Navigate the maze eating all the dots to advance to the next level
  • Avoid the ghosts — they'll cost you a life
  • Eat a power pellet to temporarily turn the tables and hunt the ghosts yourself
  • Chase high scores across increasingly difficult levels

The text-mode rendering is surprisingly charming. Characters and block elements stand in for the sprites, and on a color terminal it looks exactly like what it is: a love letter to arcade gaming.

Installing MyMan

Linux

From source (recommended):

MyMan's source tarball is available from SourceForge. You'll need ncurses development headers and a C compiler.

# Install dependencies (Debian/Ubuntu)
sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5-dev

# Fedora/RHEL
sudo dnf install gcc ncurses-devel

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S base-devel ncurses

Download the latest source from SourceForge and build:

tar xzf myman-*.tar.gz
cd myman-*/
./configure
make
sudo make install

Then launch it:

myman

Arch Linux (AUR):

yay -S myman
# or
paru -S myman

macOS

Using Homebrew:

brew install myman

If it's not in the main tap, install from source. You'll need Xcode command-line tools and ncurses:

xcode-select --install
brew install ncurses

tar xzf myman-*.tar.gz
cd myman-*/
./configure
make
sudo make install

On modern macOS you may need to tell configure where Homebrew's ncurses lives:

./configure CPPFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix ncurses)/include" \
            LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix ncurses)/lib"
make
sudo make install

Keybindings

Key Action
Arrow keys Move Pac-Man
q Quit
p Pause

Why Play MyMan?

There's something deeply satisfying about playing an arcade classic in the same environment where you compile code and push commits. MyMan is lightweight, requires no X server, works over SSH, and is a perfect five-minute distraction between tasks. It's retro gaming at its most minimal — and most charming.

Project page: https://myman.sourceforge.io