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icecheese 1 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 24 hours 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 10 hours 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...
dasyatidprime 1 days ago [-]
For the broader field I tend to use the term “character-cell art”.
killerstorm 1 days ago [-]
My favorite ASCII art group is Galza, some examples:
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.
jlundberg 1 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:
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...
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
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.
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/
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