Rendering images as text

Conclusions

A few last suggestions for interesting applications: you might want to take a look at asciinema [20], MapSCII [21], and ASCIIQuarium [22].

With asciinema, you can record terminal sessions as video. In addition, the project website acts as a YouTube replacement and preserves your recorded sequences in 8-bit. MapSCII (Figure 8), a digital atlas based on OpenStreetMap, offers a zoom function (Figure 8): Use A to zoom in, Z to zoom out, and the arrow keys to navigate. The coordinates of the image's center at the bottom of the screen help with orientation.

Figure 8: MapSCII is an ASCII-based digital atlas with zoom functions.

For a little entertainment at the terminal, try the ASCIIQuarium (Figure 9), which turns your terminal into a virtual aquarium. Happy fishing!

Figure 9: ASCIIQuarium puts diverse aquatic species on your terminal.

Infos

  1. Escape Sequences: https://www.nayab.xyz/linux/escapecodes.html
  2. "Call web pages in the terminal with Browsh" by Tim Schürmann, ADMIN Magazine, issue 53, 2019, https://www.admin-magazine.com/Archive/2019/53/Call-web-pages-in-the-terminal-with-Browsh
  3. "Creating artistic images with ASCII art" by Frank Hofmann and Thomas Winde, Linux Magazine, issue 168, November 2014, https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2014/168/ASCII-Art/(language)/eng-US
  4. AAlib: http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/
  5. libcaca: http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca
  6. BBCode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode
  7. AnsiLove: https://www.ansilove.org/
  8. "Pictures in pure HTML with chafa and aha" by Axel Beckert: http://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Pictures%20in%20pure%20HTML%20with%20chafa%20and%20aha.futile
  9. chafa: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/
  10. aha: https://github.com/theZiz/aha
  11. catimg: https://github.com/posva/catimg
  12. jp2a: https://github.com/cslarsen/jp2a
  13. Orca: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
  14. mpv: https://mpv.io
  15. Hasciicam: http://ascii.dyne.org
  16. qrencode: https://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/
  17. qrcode: https://github.com/skip2/go-qrcode
  18. pass-otp: https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp
  19. pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/
  20. asciinema: https://asciinema.org/
  21. MapSCII: https://mapscii.me/
  22. ASCIIQuarium: https://robobunny.com/projects/asciiquarium/html/

The Author

Frank Hofmann mostly works on the road as a developer, trainer, and author. His favorite places for working are Berlin, Geneva, and Cape Town. Axel Beckert is a Linux system administrator and network security specialist for ETH Zurich's IT services department. He is also involved with the Debian distribution, the Linux User Group Switzerland (LUGS), the Hackerfunk podcast, and various open source projects. Hofmann and Beckert are authors of Debian Package Management.

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