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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.

Articles

ASCII Art History

ASCII Art History provides us with a brief history of the development of text based art over the millenia, concrete poetry to typewriter art to ASCII and ANSI art.

Adding and Viewing Art Galleries

Adding and Viewing Art Galleries details a brief tutorial introduction to generating a new ASCII Art gallery and viewing it.

ASCII Art Tools

ASCII Art Tools describes several tools not included in Asciiville that may be of use in drawing and painting ASCII Art

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.

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
ascinit(1) : initialize the Asciiville environment
btop(1) : character based system monitor
cbftp(1) : character based FTP client
diagon(1) : generate Ascii Art diagrams
show_ascii_art(1) : ASCII art generation and display
show_moon(1) : display the phase of the Moon
show_weather(1) : display a weather report
termprofset(1) : manipulate terminal profiles and font sizes

Videos

Introduction to Asciiville Video:

Asciiville Art Slideshow Video:

Asciiville Space Slideshow Video:

Screenshots

Asciiville Main Menu

Asciiville Sub-Menus: Ascii Art, Asciimatics Animations, MusicPlayerPlus, and RoonCommandLine

Ascii System Monitor, Maps, and Weather

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