sha256-animation

Why we included this project

Showing someone how SHA-256 works is genuinely hard, and this tool turns that explanation into something you can watch. Give it a string, a hex value, or a file and it animates the whole pipeline in your terminal, drawing padding, the message schedule, and each rotation, XOR, choice, and majority operation, with fast and step-through modes so a live demo can pace itself. Individual functions like rotr, shr, ch, and maj run on their own when you want to isolate a single concept, and a second script hashes hex data for a double SHA-256 workflow, down to a real Bitcoin block header. It is a teaching companion to the NIST specification rather than a general-purpose hashing library, written in plain Ruby that you can read and modify for your own demos or study notes.