Dispenser
This is an ANSI art dispenser for the modern terminal. It uses retrofit to apply transformations that make it possible to view ANSI art pieces in a regular Unix-like terminal and Windows console.
Just point curl to this URL and get a random entry from an archive of classic and modern ANSI pieces:
curl -L https://textmode.cc/dispenser
Note that -L option is necessary, as the page will redirect you to the actual content.
Tips
- Use https://textmode.cc/dispenser?24bit URL for glorious truecolor!
Caveats
The quality of the displayed art heavily depends on your terminal font setting. Most terminals are configurable to do it right, but some work very well out of the box:
- xterm *
- gnome-terminal *
- kitty *
- rxvt-unicode
- st *
- Windows WSL terminal *
Terminals marked with an asterisk support 24-bit colors. Refer to the a git on GitHub to see other terminal support for truecolor. Or, just check with yours!
24-bit color support in terminals
Windows console
Current Windows 10 console is able to view ANSI art pieces correctly, but user needs to enable the VT support and run `chcp 65001` command before calling the dispenser. Note that, once configured it even supports 24-bit color.
Terminal.app
Terminal.app in macOS shows too much space between the lines in its default setting. Changing the line spacing to 0.8 makes it look better. Still, the block drawing characters don't look good in the default SF Mono font. But it's still worth a try! Note that Terminal.app has no support for 24-bit color.
Ubuntu and gnome-terminal
Note that the Ubuntu monospaced font uses transparency-based, rather than texture-based shading for the block characters, which makes for an unusual experience.
How does it work?
The original ANSI files have been processed with retrofit to apply the following transformations:
- The original code page 437 encoding is changed to UTF-8.
- The width of the displayed art is fixed to 80 columns (even if your actual terminal is wider).
- The background is made black.
- The colors are adapted using 8-bit or 24-bit palettes to match the original palette closer.
- Intense graphic rendition mode yields brighter colors, rather than bold fonts.
- iCE colors are properly interpreted as bright background.
- PabloDraw 24-bit color codes are translated into regular 24-bit palette colors (in 24-bit mode only).
- Various ANSI escape codes are made to work more like their classic implementations.
Whole archive access
You can access the ANSI archive used by the dispenser.
Alternatively there are compressed tarballs available for:
Once downloaded, the individual files can just be printed in the terminal with cat. Please note that the names of processed files have been slightly mangled. Do not upload them anywhere under the filename of the original artwork.