A terminal text art generator that renders images as colored text.
demo.mp4
Install Rust, then:
cargo install --path .Run hype help
- Block — Uses Unicode half-block characters (
▀/▄) to pack two vertical pixels per character cell with independent foreground and background colors. This is the default mode and produces the highest fidelity output. - Braille — Maps 2x4 pixel blocks to Unicode braille characters (U+2800–U+28FF), giving a dot-matrix look. Each cell is colored by the average color of its lit dots. A configurable brightness threshold controls which dots are lit.
- ASCII — Renders using a range of ASCII characters selected by luminance, for compatibility with any terminal or font.
- Truecolor (24-bit) — Full RGB color via ANSI escape sequences. Auto-detected from the
COLORTERMenvironment variable. - 256-color — Maps colors to the ANSI 256-color palette (6x6x6 color cube + grayscale ramp) using perceptually-weighted nearest-match. Used as the fallback when truecolor is not detected.
- Grayscale — Renders using only grayscale values.
- Floyd-Steinberg — Error-diffusion dithering for smooth gradients.
- Ordered (Bayer 4x4) — Patterned dithering for a stylized, halftone-like look.
- Alpha compositing — Transparent regions can be composited against a configurable background color (black, white, or any RGB value). Without a background, transparency is preserved as the terminal's own background.
- Auto-sizing — Output dimensions default to the terminal width with aspect ratio preserved. Width and height can also be set explicitly.
- Input image format support — PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and WebP.
This project was written by Claude with human supervision. The first working version only took 1 hour!