ANSI art editor

An ANSI art editor is a program (traditionally written for MS-DOS) used to situate and colour text and semigraphics characters, traditionally from the [CP 437] character set, on a terminal display, saving the output. (And of course they can be used not just to create original ANSI art, but also to alter -- or edit -- existing screens. ANSI art has no DRM!) In the early Public Domain days it was assumed that the ANSI artist would be drawing for a screen of 80x25 proportions and saving in ANSI format, but programs looking for features they could adopt so as to distinguish themselves from the competition quickly began pushing at these boundaries. Some editors would offer tools to facilitate the creation of [ANSI music] or ANSImations, wider or taller canvases, support for other file formats, mouse drawing, alternate character sets and custom colour palettes. The PD ANSI art [killer app] was Ian E. Davis' TheDraw.

Underground ANSI artists really chafed at the limitations imposed by PD ANSI art tools, and engaged [elite] coders to whip them up specialist software to help them smash the limitations they felt constrained by (and discard the functionality that the underground found unfashionable). The first program to successfully overturn TheDraw's hegemony, virtually overnight, was [ACiDDraw], followed in quick succession by PabloDraw, Empathy, ArtworX, Tundradraw, CIADraw, DarkDraw, and Envy Technologies' A3E (whose 3 As stood for ANSI art, ANSImation, and ANSI music. A3E is quite obscure overall but Burps swears by it!)

Following the sunsetting of the MS-DOS era, there was not much competition in the ANSI art editor space, as there was not much demand for ANSI art in a GUI era! But PabloDraw staggered on for a long time as the sole survivor, and eventually was joined by Moebius as the major rival. 21st-century ANSI art editors have other categories of concerns, and features common to them include the ability to host networked collaborative drawing sessions and support for related textmode or vintage graphics formats such as RIPscrip, [PETSCII] and [Unicode]. (In the year 2026 it seems that GenAI drawing assistance can't be far away, even though it's not really clear that anyone is asking for it.) Other modern ANSI art editors include [IcyDraw], DurDraw, DarkDraw II, [Draw32], the in-browser text.0w.nz, and [ANSIpants] for iOS/Mac.

Programs such as [RexPaint], [PLAYSCII] and [lvllvl] are [textmode] art editors but lacking the ability to output valid ANSI data, cannot be considered ANSI art editors.

Other historical ANSI art editors include ANSIDraw, AMProsoft's ANSInator, Roy/SAC's ATE (Ansi Text Editor), DuhDraw, ITPDraw, MysticDraw, NewDraw, PaintPro, the RAGE ANSI editor, ShmANSI, SyncDraw, TetraDraw, and VTXEdit.