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icecheese 4 days ago [-]
ANSI art is still alive. We have some great modern editors, like Moebius, Durdraw, Icydraw and Pablodraw.
Some of them, like Durdraw, have fully embraced the extended Unicode character set (Utf-8 encoding instead of IBM's Code Page 437) and extended colors (xterm 256 colors instead of the traditional 16 colors), keeping ANSI art relevant and viable into the foreseeable future.
People are making logos and assets for their modern TUI apps and games, for example. Neovim themes. Ly display manager wallpapers.
I am personally glad to see that the medium is coming back into relevance. It was such a fun part of digital culture and creativity in the 90s. I hope the next generation gets to experience some of that thanks to modern tooling, instead of just observed as a relic of the past.
Edit: There is also a debate as to whether Unicode/Utf-8 characters with ANSI and Xterm escape codes constitutes "ANSI art." Some are calling it "UNSI art," or just modern terminal art.
Also, shout-out to the CP437 ANSI artists who continue to evolve the artistic styles of the medium, push the envelope, and release new ANSI packs. Hard, valuable work.
JdeBP 3 days ago [-]
"ANSI Art" has been the true problem name all along. "ASCII Art" used the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.
Even if one took it to mean using ECMA 35 and ECMA 48 escape and control sequences, which wholly forgets the likes of Avatar and PCBoard, "ANSI Art" usually did not actually use any ECMA 35 character set switching, instead relying upon SAUCE data and suchlike and using IBM's (not ANSI's nor ECMA's) rather different code page system and 8-bit character sets, and usually furthermore misinterpreted ECMA 48 SGR sequences when it came to blinking, bright, faint, and bold.
If people are preferring "XTerm Art" or "Terminal Art" for what is made nowadays, that seems to be a nomenclature change for the better.
skrellm 3 days ago [-]
> "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.
More importantly, where the name is originating from, is the DOS driver. By default DOS did not interpret color codes, one would have to load ANSI.SYS for that, and that's where the term "ANSI art" comes from. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI.SYS
> There is also a debate as to whether Unicode/Utf-8 characters with ANSI and Xterm escape codes constitutes "ANSI art." Some are calling it "UNSI art," or just modern terminal art.
Yes, they do. Escape sequences have nothing to do with the encoding and code page (all characters in CSI and SGR are ASCII only, hence the same in both CP437 and UNICODE and even as UTF-8 encoded). Using the name "UNSI art" for these is good practice though to explicitly indicate UTF-8 encoding (and maybe the existence of non-standard SGR sequences, like 24 bit RGB colors).
I have a project (interactive textual adventure) where I convert graphics into ANSI/ASCII art on-the-fly. I've implemented several methods, you can choose between them with CLI flags (including different escape sequences and charactersets as well). See https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/meg4_advgame/#playing-in-a-termina...
JdeBP 21 hours ago [-]
I think that you need to re-read "escape sequences" and "American National Standards Institute" a few more times until it clicks that these are two entirely different noun phrases.
Then you need to learn a lot more about control sequences.
You can start with CSI, value 0x009B, not being an ASCII character. Then proceed to ITU T.416 (ISO 8613-6) where the SGR control sequences for indexed and direct RGB colours are standardized. Then you can learn that the "E" in ECMA-48 does not stand for "ANSI", but for "European". And finally you can discover that ECMA-48 standardizes exactly 8 colours. 16 colour SGR sequences beloved of CGA-like and VGA-like art are not in the standards and are in fact the product of IBM's AIXterm.
dasyatidprime 3 days ago [-]
For the broader field I tend to use the term “character-cell art”.
killerstorm 4 days ago [-]
My favorite ASCII art group is Galza, some examples:
This dovetails nicely with the fullscreen ANSI viewer I made to fix the static PNG issue: https://sure.is/ansi
You can paste any 16 Colors link and it will render, including packs. I mean to improve on it someday, but it has some fun features like setting the baud rate for display, adjust the blending blocks, keeps any text selectable, etc.
jlundberg 4 days ago [-]
One group that still releases ascii and uploads to 16colo.rs is Impure.
They also make demos and won 2nd place at the Evoke demo party this year with the following ascii style demo:
Its not as elegant or ethereal as the hand-crafted stuff, but for us mere mortals, with little to no artistic ability it could prove useful in certain design endeavors.
Some of them, like Durdraw, have fully embraced the extended Unicode character set (Utf-8 encoding instead of IBM's Code Page 437) and extended colors (xterm 256 colors instead of the traditional 16 colors), keeping ANSI art relevant and viable into the foreseeable future.
People are making logos and assets for their modern TUI apps and games, for example. Neovim themes. Ly display manager wallpapers.
I am personally glad to see that the medium is coming back into relevance. It was such a fun part of digital culture and creativity in the 90s. I hope the next generation gets to experience some of that thanks to modern tooling, instead of just observed as a relic of the past.
Edit: There is also a debate as to whether Unicode/Utf-8 characters with ANSI and Xterm escape codes constitutes "ANSI art." Some are calling it "UNSI art," or just modern terminal art.
Also, shout-out to the CP437 ANSI artists who continue to evolve the artistic styles of the medium, push the envelope, and release new ANSI packs. Hard, valuable work.
Even if one took it to mean using ECMA 35 and ECMA 48 escape and control sequences, which wholly forgets the likes of Avatar and PCBoard, "ANSI Art" usually did not actually use any ECMA 35 character set switching, instead relying upon SAUCE data and suchlike and using IBM's (not ANSI's nor ECMA's) rather different code page system and 8-bit character sets, and usually furthermore misinterpreted ECMA 48 SGR sequences when it came to blinking, bright, faint, and bold.
If people are preferring "XTerm Art" or "Terminal Art" for what is made nowadays, that seems to be a nomenclature change for the better.
Yes, they do. All the color escape sequences (CSI and SGR) used in these were standardized by ANSI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
More importantly, where the name is originating from, is the DOS driver. By default DOS did not interpret color codes, one would have to load ANSI.SYS for that, and that's where the term "ANSI art" comes from. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI.SYS
> There is also a debate as to whether Unicode/Utf-8 characters with ANSI and Xterm escape codes constitutes "ANSI art." Some are calling it "UNSI art," or just modern terminal art.
Yes, they do. Escape sequences have nothing to do with the encoding and code page (all characters in CSI and SGR are ASCII only, hence the same in both CP437 and UNICODE and even as UTF-8 encoded). Using the name "UNSI art" for these is good practice though to explicitly indicate UTF-8 encoding (and maybe the existence of non-standard SGR sequences, like 24 bit RGB colors).
I have a project (interactive textual adventure) where I convert graphics into ANSI/ASCII art on-the-fly. I've implemented several methods, you can choose between them with CLI flags (including different escape sequences and charactersets as well). See https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/meg4_advgame/#playing-in-a-termina...
Then you need to learn a lot more about control sequences.
You can start with CSI, value 0x009B, not being an ASCII character. Then proceed to ITU T.416 (ISO 8613-6) where the SGR control sequences for indexed and direct RGB colours are standardized. Then you can learn that the "E" in ECMA-48 does not stand for "ANSI", but for "European". And finally you can discover that ECMA-48 standardizes exactly 8 colours. 16 colour SGR sequences beloved of CGA-like and VGA-like art are not in the standards and are in fact the product of IBM's AIXterm.
https://16colo.rs/pack/galza-13/Shd-dphn.ans
https://16colo.rs/pack/galza-13/zj-humming.txt
https://16colo.rs/pack/codi_01/CODI01.ans
You can paste any 16 Colors link and it will render, including packs. I mean to improve on it someday, but it has some fun features like setting the baud rate for display, adjust the blending blocks, keeps any text selectable, etc.
They also make demos and won 2nd place at the Evoke demo party this year with the following ascii style demo:
https://demozoo.org/productions/396656/
Its not as elegant or ethereal as the hand-crafted stuff, but for us mere mortals, with little to no artistic ability it could prove useful in certain design endeavors.
I actually pushed a lot of updates to it just this past week. There's keyboard and swipe/gesture navigation, too.
2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44665816