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Glitch Text

Text effect Vanilla JS · zero dependencies Kit: Cinematic Dark — soon
TINKERFX
-- fps
prefers-reduced-motion detected — animation paused, clean text shown

X-ray · layers

letters flip to random chars
red / cyan ghost copies
horizontal strips jump aside

Parameters

Your text
Burst every2.0 s
Burst length0.35 s
Scramble amount0.30
RGB offset4 px
your version · updates as you tinker

How this effect works

Glitch text is a clean headline that misbehaves on a schedule. A timer fires a short "burst" every couple of seconds; during the burst, three independent layers corrupt the text, and when it ends everything snaps back to normal. Turn the layers off above to see each one alone.

The scramble layer swaps a fraction of the letters for random characters every frame — that's the "signal corruption" look. The RGB split layer draws two ghost copies of the text, one red shifted left and one cyan shifted right, like a badly calibrated CRT. The slices layer clips those copies to thin horizontal strips and throws them sideways, so the headline looks cut into ribbons. All of it is plain DOM and CSS transforms driven by requestAnimationFrame — no libraries.

Production notes: respects prefers-reduced-motion (shows the clean headline, no bursts) · extremely cheap — it animates one element, cost does not grow with text length in any meaningful way · keep burst length under ~0.5 s for legibility: the reader should always win against the glitch · the copied snippet is self-contained HTML + CSS + JS.