Image-to-text conversions made in Chafa by its author, Hans Petter Jansson, 2025. The first two use the Terminus font and the bottom two use Blapinus. The original Himeji image is 3.4 MB in the PNG-format, while the 200-column text version is less than 0.9 MB. A JPG in 90% quality is 724 KB while a gzip-compressed 200-column text version is 230 KB.
Terminal Text Effects, a visual effects engine for terminals by Chris Builds. Only a selection of effects shown here. h/t: Ray Manta
A beer animation for the VT100 terminal. Unknown author and date. More VT100 here and here.
Chafa by Hans Petter Jansson converts images and video to text for terminals. We posted about it before but there are new example images that demonstrates how e.g colour and character sets affect the results.
Original
16 colours, compatible with many terminals
24-bit colour
2 default terminal colours and allows control codes for inverted characters.
240 fixed colours
No colours, no control.
Original
ASCII-fill (16 colours)
Braille fill (16 colours)
No fill (16 colours)
Offpunk is like an offline browser that saves the internet on your harddrive so you can browse it in the terminal. Images are converted with Chafa. Made by Ploum.
Offpunk obviously works best with uncomplicated websites, but if you want to browse any website in textmode, no in the terminal, you can use Browsh.
ASCII Theater by the American art collective MSCHF, 2024. An easy way to look at ANSI-versions of movies in the terminal. Today streaming Barbie, tomorrow Hereditary! From their Instagram-post:
ASCII Theater plays movies as text, directly in Terminal. A single line of code begins playing a new movie every day, like a pirate radio broadcast. The movies are rendered not as video but as colored text characters – every frame can be copied and pasted as a giant string of letters.
There is a long internet tradition of hacks to stream content online, and the resulting workarounds become creatively expressive. That kid who streamed NBA games in the reflection of his sunglasses on Twitch is a hero.
ASCII Theater is now live, streaming a new movie every day until we get shut down.
via kottke.org. Browse our terminal tag.
BAMBI versus GODZILLA, by Dave Brett for the VT100 terminal. A comment on the video mentions seeing it in 1980, so this post is dated to 1979.
It’s based on an animation from 1969 by Marv Newland. This and other VT100-animations are available at textfiles.com.
Examples from clankill3r’s P5 Terminal Graphics, which uses the terminal to show things programmed in Processing.
The first image shows a ROM-dump of the font in the classic terminals VT100 and VT220. The second image is how they appear on screen. The difference is more than just aspect ratio. Look at letters like q and p: pixels are sometimes doubled, sometimes tripled. The fascinating explanation is here.
Southwest Technical’s 6800 computer and the CT-64 terminal, and a photo of its 64×16 textmode. Launched in 1975. First image from Creative Computing and second one from here.
