Show HN: Web-based ANSI art viewer

by lubujackson • 4 months ago

29 7 4 months ago

My love letter to ANSI art. Full width rendering, scrolling by baud rate, text is selectable, and more.

There are some example links at the top if you're feeling lucky.

lubujackson2• 4 months ago

Creator here - this was much more technically difficult than it seems, because rendering pixel perfect backgrounds with scaling width is non-obvious. Hit 'Esc' and you can set some options, including changing the background pattern.

If you want to see a big file, I have a direct link to load the Blocktronics WTF4 ANSI which is over 4000 lines: https://sure.is/ansi/?wtf4=1

0x0732• 4 months ago

Wow nice. Is there a fastscroll in mobile?

lubujackson2• 4 months ago

On the loading page you can click the word "Esc" to open the options menu and set the speed there. If you select "full line render" you can then set it from .25x to 10x speed and it doesn't do the character-by-character rendering.

raldi• 4 months ago

This is very cool! And I say that as someone who was in iCE in the early 1990s ;)

The baud scrolling and SAUCE support are nicely done, and "drag a zip here" is top-tier magic, though when I tried dragging in an old iCE pack's zip file, it only showed one ANSI inside there; I was expecting a file picker.

Feature suggestions: "Show invisible text" toggle and an option to switch between 16-color background mode and 8-color background mode with blink support. You're already parsing the SAUCE which has an "iCE colors" boolean; you can use this to control the default for the latter setting.

Details: https://forum.16colo.rs/t/ice-colors-or-blinking-text/27

kristopolous• 4 months ago

Really I'd love to see animations from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw work.

gwbas1c• 4 months ago

I love this! I ran a dial-up BBS in the 1990s and still have a soft spot for ANSI. It was like looking at LiteBrite for computer nerds.

Thanks a million!

Show HN: Web-based ANSI art viewer

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