ninvaders mit Homebrew, apt, Nix, zypper installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Repository
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• nInvaders

Projektgeschichte

The Debian man page credits Thomas Dettbarn as the program author, says the program is GPL, and dates the manual page to July 21, 2002. The SourceForge homepage points users to CVS snapshots and beta testing, and its news section records nInvaders 0.1.1 on May 8, 2003, after the 0.0.10 release on April 8, 2003.

The 0.1.1 SourceForge news entry says that release added a timer, made the game playable under IRIX, Windows, and some Red Hat versions, added a title screen, and fixed a freeze when shooting the last alien. The package has not grown into an actively evolving game platform; it is a finished little terminal toy.

Adoptionsgeschichte

nInvaders persists through package managers rather than an active upstream community. Debian still publishes a man page for package versions in unstable/testing, Homebrew bottles it for macOS and Linux, and SourceForge still hosts the old tarballs.

On 2026-07-01, Homebrew listed nInvaders 0.1.1 with 524 installs over 365 days, while SourceForge listed the 0.1.1 folder with 107 weekly downloads. Those numbers are small, but for a 2003 terminal game they show durable curiosity and packaging inertia.

Wie es verwendet wird

Usage is intentionally simple: run `nInvaders`, move with the left and right arrow keys, shoot with space, and optionally set a starting skill level with `-l`. Debian's manual describes it as ASCII-art Space Invaders using ncurses, playable anywhere a terminal can render it.

For package nerds it is useful as a smoke-test/fun package: ncurses, terminal input, simple build system, old upstream tarball, and a binary whose behavior is immediately visible.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

nInvaders is a good enrichment record precisely because it is niche. It represents the long tail of package databases: not strategically important, but culturally recognizable, easy to install, and stable enough that distros can keep carrying it almost unchanged.

Zeitleiste

• {'date': '2002-07-21', 'event': 'Debian manual page dated; credits Thomas Dettbarn as program author.'}
• {'date': '2003-04-08', 'event': 'SourceForge file listing records nInvaders 0.0.10.'}
• {'date': '2003-05-08', 'event': 'nInvaders 0.1.1 released on SourceForge.'}

Quellen

• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/ninvaders
• https://github.com/TheZ3ro/ninvaders
• https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/ninvaders/ninvaders.6.en.html
• https://ninvaders.sourceforge.net/
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/ninvaders/files/ninvaders/