Overview

Asciiville integrations and extensions are aimed at the character based terminal and console user. They enable easy to use seamlessly integrated control of a variety of ASCII Art, animation, and utilities in a lightweight character based environment.

At the core of Asciiville is the asciiville command which acts as a front-end for a variety of terminal commands and tmux sessions.

The asciiville command can be used to display Ascii Art either as a slideshow or interactively. For example:

# Slideshow of Ascii Art in /usr/share/asciiville/art/Art/
asciiville -V Art
# Slideshow of Ascii Art in /usr/share/asciiville/art/Vintage/
asciiville -V Vintage
# Interactive display of Ascii Art in .../file1 and .../file2
asciiville file1 file2 ...
# Slideshow of Ascii Art in file1, file2, and file3
asciiville -V files file1 file2 file3
# Slideshow of Ascii Art files listed in /tmp/asciiart.txt
asciiville -V files=/tmp/asciiart.txt

Filenames provided to asciiville, either on the command line or in a specified file, can be absolute paths to files; relative paths to files; or relative paths to files in the Asciiville Ascii Art galleries folder. Ascii Art filenames may be provided with or without the filename suffix (e.g. Friends/tux.asc or Friends/tux.asc.gz or Friends/tux).

When viewing Ascii Art in display mode it is possible to enter ‘browse/zoom’ mode by entering ‘b’ or ‘z’ at the keyboard. In this mode the currently displayed art can be zoomed in and out. See the Usage section below.

The asciiville command can also be used to invoke commands in a variety of ways:

  • The lightweight character based system monitor, btop

  • The lightweight character based web browser, w3m

  • The lightweight character based mail client, neomutt

  • The lightweight character based RSS feed reader, newsboat

  • 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

  • The lightweight character based journal app, jrnl

  • The lightweight character based terminal UI for Reddit, tuir

  • Featureful ASCII Art display including slideshow and zoom capabilities

  • Character based ASCII Art and image to ascii conversion utility jp2a

  • One or more terminal emulators running a command

  • A tmux session

  • A command line web search

  • A zoomable map of the world

  • Translate words and phrases from and to a wide variety of languages

  • A network download/upload speed test

  • The AAlib BB demo running in a tmux session (Debian based systems only)

  • The ASCII text-based dungeon game nethack with Extended ASCII glyphs

  • The cmatrix command that displays the screen from “The Matrix”

  • Many text based applications and games

  • ASCII Art creation tool aewan

  • Display system info

  • Display a random Pokemon

  • 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

  • Several asciimatics animations optionally accompanied by audio

Without arguments or with the -i argument, asciiville presents a set of interactive menus that can be used to control its behavior.

Integration is provided for:

  • aewan, Ascii Art creation tool

  • btop, character based system monitor

  • cbftp, character based FTP client

  • ddgr, command line web search using DuckDuckGo

  • googler, command line web search using Google

  • jrnl, a simple command line journal application

  • khard, address book for the Unix console

  • w3m, another character based web browser

  • lynx, character based web browser

  • mutt, character based email client

  • neomutt, character based email client

  • neovim, advanced open source screen-based text editor

  • newsboat, character based RSS feed reader

  • ranger, character based file manager

  • tuir, terminal UI for Reddit

  • gdu, character based disk usage analyzer

  • got, text based translation tool

  • 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

  • endoh1, ascii fluid dynamics simulation

  • mapscii, zoomable map of the world

  • cmatrix, screen from “The Matrix”

  • nethack, ASCII text dungeon game

  • ninvaders, ASCII text version of Space Invaders

  • tetris, ASCII text version of Tetris

  • tmux, a terminal multiplexer

  • wttr.in, console-oriented weather report

  • Enhanced key bindings for extended control of terminal windows

  • Support for several terminal emulators

    • xfce4-terminal

    • gnome-terminal

    • kitty

    • 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