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Asciiville Wiki

Welcome to Asciiville!

The Asciiville project integrates and extends ASCII art, ASCII animations, and several ASCII utilities to provide a lightweight, rich, powerful, and flexible character based environment for Linux platforms.

Table of contents

1. Overview
2. Asciiville Commands
3. Articles
4. Man Pages
5. Companion repositories
6. See Also

Overview

Asciiville provides several commands to manage and augment a Linux console environment. The asciiville command acts as the primary user interface and front-end for a variety of terminal commands, tmux sessions, ASCII art displays, ASCII animations, and launching character based utilities. The asciiville command can be used to launch:

• The lightweight character based system monitor, btop
• The lightweight character based web browser, lynx or w3m
• The lightweight character based mail client, mutt
• The lightweight character based FTP client, cbftp
• The lightweight character based music player, mpcplus
• The lightweight character based file manager, ranger
• The lightweight character based disk usage analyzer, gdu
• One or more terminal emulators running a command
• A tmux session
• A command line web search
• A zoomable map of the world
• A command line character based Twitter client
• A network download/upload speed test
• The AAlib BB demo running in a tmux session (Debian based systems only)
• Character based ASCII art and image to ascii conversion utility jp2a
• Display system info
• Display the Phase of the Moon
• Display a weather report
• Display the MusicPlayerPlus or RoonCommandLine interactive menus
• Any character based client the user wishes to run
• One of several ASCIImatics animations optionally accompanied by audio

Integration is provided for:

• btop, character based system monitor
• cbftp, character based FTP client
• ddgr, command line web search
• lynx, character based web browser
• w3m, another character based web browser
• mutt, character based email client
• ranger, character based file manager
• gdu, character based disk usage analyzer
• mpcplus, featureful ncurses based Music Player client
• mplayer, a media player
• asciimatics - automatically display a variety of character based animation effects
• asciinema - automatically create ascii character based video clips
• rainbowstream - command line character based Twitter client
  • See the rainbowstream usage manual to get started
• mapscii, zoomable map of the world
• tmux, a terminal multiplexer
• wttr.in, console-oriented weather report
• Enhanced key bindings for extended control of terminal windows
• Several terminal emulators
  • xfce4-terminal
  • gnome-terminal
  • tilix
  • cool-retro-term
• MusicPlayerPlus, character based suite of commands to manage music server and player
• RoonCommandLine, command line control of the Roon audio system over a local network

Asciiville Commands

Asciiville adds the following commands to your system:

• asciiville : primary user interface, invokes terminal emulators, ascii animations, system monitor, mail client, file manager, web browser, and more
• btop : character based system monitor
• cbftp : character based FTP client
• ascinit : one-time initializaton of a user's Asciiville configuration
• btop-tmux : runs btop in a tmux session
• bb-tmux : runs aalib bb demo in a tmux session
• asciisplash : fun ascii art screens using ASCIImatics animations. Ascii art commands:
  • asciiart : ASCIImatics animated art images
  • asciijulia : ASCIImatics animated zoom on a Julia Set
  • asciiplasma : ASCIImatics animated plasma graphic
  • asciimpplus : ASCIImatics animated Music Player Plus splash screen
• chktermcolor : checks if a terminal has 24-bit true color support
• ddgr : command line web search
• jp2a : image to ascii conversion utility
• mapscii : character based zoomable map of the world
• rainbowstream : command line Twitter client
• set_xfce_trans : sets an xfce4-terminal window's transparency level

Two companion repositories that may be of interest to Linux command line users are the MusicPlayerPlus project and the RoonCommandLine project.

The MusicPlayerPlus project provides integration and extension of several character based audio packages designed to stream and play music. The project includes the mpcplus character based Music Player Daemon (MPD) client as well as several commands to provide a powerful and flexible command line driven audio command environment.

The RoonCommandLine project provides Bash and Python scripts to enable command line control of the Roon audio system over a local network using the Python Roon API.

Articles

• History of ASCII Art : A brief history of the development of text based art over the millenia, concrete poetry to typewriter art to ASCII and ANSI art

Man Pages

• asciiville(1) : primary user interface, front-end for all components
• asciiart(1) : ASCIImatics animation featuring Asciiville features
• asciijulia(1) : ASCIImatics animation featuring a Julia Set
• asciimpplus(1) : ASCIImatics animation featuring MusicPlayerPlus features
• asciiplasma(1) : ASCIImatics animation featuring Plasma effect
• asciisplash-tmux(1) : ASCIImatics animations in Tmux front-end
• asciisplash(1) : ASCIImatics animations front-end
• btop(1) : character based system monitor
• cbftp(1) : character based FTP client
• show_ascii_art(1) : ASCII art generation and display

Companion repositories

• MusicPlayerPlus
• MirrorCommand
• MirrorImages
• DoctorFreeScripts
• RoonCommandLine
• MMM-YouTubeWebView Module
• MMM-TelegramCommands Module
• MMM-MacAddressScan Module
• MMM-InstagramView Module
• core-custom-local Debian package

See Also

Asciiville includes a plethora of Ascii art, animation, utilities, and tools but there are many more useful or fun character based projects you may wish to install. Here are a few used by the Ascii Artists at Asciiville but not included in the Asciiville project:

• aview, ASCII art image viewer: sudo apt install aview; asciiview image.png
• bat, a cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration
• cmatrix : sudo apt install cmatrix; cmatrix -a -b
• curl parrot.live : Watch a parrot groove
• telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl : Watch Star Wars in ASCII text in your terminal:
• libaa-bin : sudo apt install libaa-bin
  • aafire, aainfo, aasavefont, and aatest programs
  • demonstrate the capabilities of the aalib library
  • aafire displays burning ASCII art flames.
  • aainfo displays information about what drivers aalib will use for the display, keyboard, and mouse, and what parameters, such as screen size those drivers will use.
  • aasavefont saves a font to a file.
  • aatest tests the capabilities of aalib.
• caca-utils : apt-get install caca-utils
  • cacaclock
  • cacademo
  • cacafire
  • cacaplay
  • cacaserver
  • cacaview
  • img2txt
• lsd : a rewrite of ls with added features like colors, icons, tree-view, more formatting options etc.
• Moebius : Photoshop-like ANSI Editor for MacOS, Linux and Windows
• nerd-fonts : add a high number of extra glyphs from popular 'iconic fonts' such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others