manic is a tiny text language for animations. Describe the shapes and what happens over time — no timeline, no keyframes — and it renders a smooth MP4. Built for math, algorithm geometry & CS explainers. Write and render right in your browser
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Maker
📌
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm Anish, maker of manic.
I kept wanting to make little animated explainers — a function curve, a geometry construction, a shape gliding across the screen — but every tool meant timelines, keyframes, or wrestling a video editor. So I built a tiny language, on top of a real 2D animation engine, instead.
ou write two things: the cast (named shapes) and the script (what happens over time). manic renders a smooth, glowing MP4 — deterministically, the same every run
manic
title("Hello");
canvas("16:9");
circle(sun, (640, 360), 90);
color(sun, cyan);
show(sun, 0.6);
It's a general-purpose 2D animation language. Today the math and geometry kits are the most built-out — function plots, axes, vectors, olympiad constructions — and it grows through pluggable kits, so new topics keep coming.
Try it in 30 seconds (no install): open the playground, click Examples, pick one, hit Render → download the MP4. The editor has live highlighting, error-checking, autocomplete, and an AI assistant that writes manic for you.
Still early — I'd love your feedback: what would you animate? What's confusing? Thanks for taking a look 🙏
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this looks great for math content, but it would help a lot if you could add a way to sync animations with audio, even just a simple beat or time marker import, so the MP4 lines up with narration automatically
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Maker
@saniyetfjq this is phase2 first all rendering should work smoothly after that sound/voice should be integrated thanks for the feedback
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Would love to see a way to import existing code snippets or pseudocode that it can interpret and animate, so you don't have to rewrite everything in the manic syntax first.
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Maker
@sudenazkfto you can use baked in AI to do that this is very interesting concept I will sure check on that
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Could be a game changer for math videos if you add a way to export the raw SVG or Lottie JSON of each frame. Right now the MP4 is great for posting, but having editable layers would let people tweak the animation in After Effects or Figma without re-rendering from scratch.
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Maker
@zzetbababagm32 Agree will do that in feature list right now focusing on core capablities first
manic is simple
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finally something that makes math explainers feel less like a chore to animate. wrote a quick bouncing ball in 30 seconds and it just rendered clean, love that I can stay in the browser.
The browser-based render straight to MP4 with no timeline fiddling is exactly the kind of focused execution that makes me want to actually use this for my own math videos.
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Maker
@gltenlekt that's the whole purpose it's for non programmers manic is simple
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the no-timeline no-keyframes approach is honestly really clever, makes animations feel way less like work and more like writing code. love that it just spits out an MP4 right in the browser
this looks great for math content, but it would help a lot if you could add a way to sync animations with audio, even just a simple beat or time marker import, so the MP4 lines up with narration automatically
@saniyetfjq this is phase2 first all rendering should work smoothly after that sound/voice should be integrated thanks for the feedback
Would love to see a way to import existing code snippets or pseudocode that it can interpret and animate, so you don't have to rewrite everything in the manic syntax first.
@sudenazkfto you can use baked in AI to do that this is very interesting concept I will sure check on that
Could be a game changer for math videos if you add a way to export the raw SVG or Lottie JSON of each frame. Right now the MP4 is great for posting, but having editable layers would let people tweak the animation in After Effects or Figma without re-rendering from scratch.
@zzetbababagm32 Agree will do that in feature list right now focusing on core capablities first
manic is simple
finally something that makes math explainers feel less like a chore to animate. wrote a quick bouncing ball in 30 seconds and it just rendered clean, love that I can stay in the browser.
@berralkmenz4kx thanks a lot
@berralkmenz4kx thanks manic is simple
The browser-based render straight to MP4 with no timeline fiddling is exactly the kind of focused execution that makes me want to actually use this for my own math videos.
@gltenlekt that's the whole purpose it's for non programmers manic is simple
the no-timeline no-keyframes approach is honestly really clever, makes animations feel way less like work and more like writing code. love that it just spits out an MP4 right in the browser
@yaar58863951762 a sample example