jkbenaim / asciishade

An ascii art editor for the console/terminal

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  ____ ___________(_|_)____/ /_  ____ _____/ /__ 
 / __ `/ ___/ ___/ / / ___/ __ \/ __ `/ __  / _ \
/ /_/ (__  ) /__/ / (__  ) / / / /_/ / /_/ /  __/
\__,_/____/\___/_/_/____/_/ /_/\__,_/\__,_/\___/ 

                   -by darkmage 
               www.evildojo.com

doin' ascii? throw some shade on it

what is an "ascii bird" even? idk

i know what shade is

1. shade keeps me cool on a hot day
2. shade is what haters throw at me so imma throw back at them
3. shade is the spirit of shadow in the old SNES RPG: Secret of Mana

Now, asciishade is an ASCII Art Editor.

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What is asciishade?

asciishade is an upcoming ASCII creation and editing tool. It is written from the ground up in C using the ncurses library.

Why write asciishade?

Highly dissatisfied with the complete lack of options in the ascii-creation department, I decided to begin implementing a pure CLI tool. I began writing shade late at night on April 30th, 2022. It was easier than expected to get something close to what I wanted right-away. Now is just about fine-tuning the system.

The state of developers online is largely sided towards web applications. I admire the simplicity and purity of CLI and 'tui' tools and programs. They can often perform much better than their web counterparts.

Update 2023-06-23

One of the goals of asciishade is to support absurdly large or small console dimensions. At the moment, the smallest size supported is 20x11. This is because the initial canvas size is automatically determined by your console's dimensions. Naturally, once loading asciis is supported, this will require managing a "view frame" that sits on top of the canvas, so that one can scroll-around their larger image.

Update 2023

Holy hell it has been a long time. The original version of asciishade was began as a Python3 project, but I later decided to start the project over in pure C to keep better in-line with my prefered style of development. Getting back into the swing of things is hard, but better to not subject yourself to the constraints of a language you learned later-on in life. While I could write asciishade in Python, C is just more fun!

Who cares about ASCII art in 2022+?

A good number of people care about ASCII art.

• Blocktronics: http://blocktronics.org/
• AciD Productions: https://16colo.rs/group/acid

Web ASCII editors

• ASCII Blaster: https://asdf.us/asciiblaster/
• asciibird: https://asciibird.jewbird.live/

Using asciishade

Building

From the project root folder, execute:

make

Running

This section is subject to change soon.

./asciishade --help
Usage: ./asciishade [OPTION]...
  -f, --filename=FILENAME    specify a filename to save to
  -h, --help                 display this help and exit

Examples

./asciishade 

./asciishade -f test.ascii

./asciishade --filename=test.ascii

./asciishade -h

./asciishade --help

Keyboard Controls

Normal Mode

• 'escape': Switch to text mode
• 'w': place a block and move up
• 'a': place a block and move left
• 's': place a block and move down
• 'd': place a block and move right
• 'S': save to file
  • if the filename was not specified on program run, it will save to untitled.ascii
• 'o': go back one color pair / one foreground color
• 'p': go forward one color pair / one foreground color
• 'O': go back one background color
• 'P': go forward one background color
• 'c': clear canvas
• 'q': quit
• arrow keys: cursor navigation
• space bar: place a block
• delete: delete a block
• backspace: delete a block and move left one

if the numpad is on...

• '1': place a block and move down left
• '2': place a block and move down
• '3': place a block and move down right
• '4': place a block and move left
• '6': place a block and move right
• '7': place a block and move up left
• '8': place a block and move up
• '9': place a block and move up right

Text Mode

• 'escape': Switch back to normal mode
• delete: delete a block
• backspace: delete a block and move left one

Features On The Way

• Loading from file
• Exporting to:
  • irc
  • ascii
  • png
  • gif
• Upload to:
  • termbin
• Half-block and quarter-block support
• Full Unicode / UTF-8 support
• Copy / paste
• Multiple tabs
• Layers
• Frames
• Custom Palettes
• Support for beyond 16 colors
• More!

Any plans for mouse support?

No!

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All of my social media contact info can be found on my website: www.evildojo.com

I stream regularly on Twitch as well at: twitch.tv/darkmage666