This looks aesthetically pleasing but this is not ASCII Art it seems, where’s ascii? All those differently sized dots are not ascii chars, are they? Perhaps this is unicode-art?
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.
Ayyy that's a much more articulate way to put what I was also thinking.
"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.
Thats awesome. I did something similar (much smaller scale) for Claude Code/Pi to show how much it's working https://github.com/robdmac/flow
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!
Flow is gorgeous and fits this ascii art theme beautifully. I've installed it and have lots of changes I'd like to make. Are you open to PRs or should I maintain my own fork without expectation of upstreaming anything?
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.
Regardless, this is a beautiful mod, reminds me of the type of MUD hacking in the early-to-mid 90s that I used to love as a child, and I'm going to be stealing/integrating this into my workflows immediately.
BTW, I used to have different ASCII art images on each of my servers. Here's a sampling:
I was mesmerized by the animation in https://omp.sh/ yesterday but this takes it to the next level. What makes something like this be prevalent now if ASCII has been around for so long? is it just the trend?
this is not ASCII, it looks like Unicode, but it's not even that, it's scripting and canvas rendering.
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 see nothing being animated because my system is set to prefer reduced motion. That's a cool accommodation, but I wish at least the demo page made that more obvious.
Neat. Some of my earliest online contributions were to local dial-up BBSs. I spent entire days making animated ascii sequences in the theme of the board.
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.
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:
Regardless, this is a beautiful mod, reminds me of the type of MUD hacking in the early-to-mid 90s that I used to love as a child, and I'm going to be stealing/integrating this into my workflows immediately.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...
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).
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.