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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
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 🙏
Demo - The Collatz Conjecture generated with manic
Math explainer
Geometry
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
About manic — animation language on Product Hunt
“Turn a few lines of code into explainer videos”
manic — animation language was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 15 upvotes and 17 comments, placing #61 on the daily leaderboard. 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
manic — animation language was featured in Design Tools (261.3k followers), Developer Tools (515.9k followers) and Video (1.9k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 121k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted manic — animation language?
manic — animation language was hunted by Anish Nath. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Anish Nath
