442 points | 29h ago | Discuss on Hacker News | Back to Radar
But this ASCII Art reminds me of my original desire to have something for each server I SSH into to help me keep a mental map of where I am. I'm not SSH'ing into servers anymore but if I was, I'd totally be trying to remake these scenes on the terminal!
Examples of changes I'd like to see:
1. I want a decay on the flame, so on every state change, the flame slowly works its way back down to a base rate, say at 2 minutes. That would imply that a strong fire is a recently changed state, while a decayed flame is a stale state that hasn't changed in a while.
2. Automatic choosing of a different animation on every open. I run half a dozen to a dozen agents on a single terminal window (full screened on a 27" monitor) and I already built a way to distinguish sessions from other other with my pre-plugin psuedoterminal crabigator and I'd like to do the same for these animations. Basically a way to distinguish sessions from other other.
3. More so than just changing animations, I'd like to have a random palette chosen per-animation, so there's multiple flames, but there's the purple-esque flames, the blue-esque flames, the red ones, the orange ones, the yellow ones, and so on.
4. I'd like a way to integrate the plugin into crabigator so its takes a single section instead of being full width.
BTW, I used to have different ASCII art images on each of my servers. Here's a sampling:
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol... https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol... https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol...
I'm absolutely open to PR's. I tried to make it easy to add your own scenes. It's also MIT so feel free to take it and run with it..
1. Yep that makes sense. I haven't really tuned the phase progression much and it def needs a lot of work. For the rocket themes for now they are progressive only until they end but id like to give them the possibility of a bumpy ride so to speak.
2. Yep definitely. Going back to the original server idea.. I'd say it would be even necessary to be able to have a config to make one session have a specific (or random) scene.
3. Yes! I was just thinking about color palettes. ie company or flag colors.
4. https://github.com/samuelclay/crabigator https://drinkcrabigator.com to save others looking it up like I did. Looks great go for it!
I've got some different features in progression so feel free to throw these up as PR's. Otherwise I might get to the config or color palette one day.
Thanks!
"ASCII art", defined honestly, means "limited set ASCII art".
https://github.com/garciahurtado/ascii-art-studio
Where's yours?
It's not correct to say that most of the information is in the color, though.
I can't remember if it's explained in the readme or not, but what makes this different from other converters is that it matches 1bit 8x8 blocks from the source image to the best matching character, increasing the perceived resolution of the output image.
It's a dumb idea I wanted to implement to amuse myself, and it's not better or worse than any similar tools, but AFAIK it uses a novel approach: fast by using a custom trained NN and uniquely looking output, similar to what a human artist might create by hand.
____\o/______/\__
It's called Help shark.
---7
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/________/ \__
from the WP article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droodles Interesting!
But it strikes me as an affectation of technical austerity, i.e. you’re borrowing the credibility of a constrained medium without embracing its constraints.
Again, it's very pretty but... it's a bit like reconfiguring your Tesla to look more like a Citroën 2CV.
"Being constructed of text characters" is a very loose definition of ASCII art. Not to say it's not visually interesting, but just that it's on the far ends of the histogram of what people think of when they hear "ASCII art".
Personally, I think the fact this is relying on colour for contrast makes this feel more like a shader that quantizes the input into little dots that just happen to be 1 of 3 characters, than ASCII Art. It's a vague border between that and an ASCII shader, and then ASCII art, but there's definitely some measureable distance between those peaks.
(=ᵔᗜᵔ=)
I'd call it an "ASCII-Art inspired shader", but some % of people would look at it and immediately call it "ASCII Art" with no confusion. Some other % of people are also going to scoff at me saying it's "ASCII-Art inspired" at all.
Should mention, I have no issue with this little project! I'm just agreeing with the parent comment that this is just hinting at the limitations of ASCII art without actually working with them, in our opinion. Thinking about art being an important step in appreciating art, and all of that.
How does one learn to write like this? Damn.
Read books. Actual books. The kind made from dead trees.
The more you read, the better you write. That's why our teachers drilled the importance of reading into us at such an early age.
I would not mind that much, but you are turning "reading a lot" into a cause of clunky writing. It is not so.
Look words up often, even when you think you know what they mean. Nowadays LLMs are really helpful dictionaries and reverse dictionaries too.
This is still very pretty though, and despite the above I do feel it gives off a good enough retro impression to elicit a pleasant nostalgia reaction.
Also, the art scenes section is not ASCII.
The rest is also very maximalist and ornamental. I like them as animations but wouldn’t like them as part of UI or TUI.
Text art itself is s prevalent because it borrows the appearance of careful crafting while it's generated by a program. Also, CLIs and text are more popular than GUIs these days, with many people.
Chat interfaces are almost like CLI! Markdown is getting more popular than binary Office text files!
Vibe coding with AI now commodifies the remaining manual steps: obtaining nice raster images, and feeding them into a text-art generator.
Or creating a script that renders them as dots on a canvas (what's done here).
I’m not one to say that all AI art is slop, but there’s so little effort here. Why exactly are so many praising this?
I deeply, deeply admire the ascii art
>...for Web Pages
No, we got rid of the <blink> tag for a reason
plus, ascii art rendered as images is not really ASCII art any more.
now lets talk about ANSI art: any DECUS heads here who can find the JACK.OFF file for me? I've tried finding it but it's nowhere I've looked. I first saw it at a Vax installation in '85. so good.
You resize the image to fit your text area dimension, then probe each pixel for luminance, and based on how bright the pixel is, you swap it for a ascii character that takes more or less space.
If you're asking about animation it's called color cycling and was quite popular back in the days where there was no space to pack a real animations: https://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0
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