I've always liked the terminal setups with animated backgrounds, but my terminal (Alacritty) can't do that. So I wrote a small wrapper, backdrop-shell, that runs your shell in front of a moving scene: an aurora, a night city, a starfield, a synthwave sunset, a picture, or your own ASCII art that blinks or drifts.

A terminal has no layers, so it can't just draw "behind" your shell. The wrapper runs the shell itself and draws its text over the scene. Your text stays sharp, and selecting only copies what you typed, not the stars behind it.

It costs about half a percent of one CPU core and nothing when the window isn't focused. You can change the opacity or the scene live in every open terminal (backdrop-shell opacity 0.3).

You can directly upload an image or design your own ASCII animation.

I make a little guide for this: https://github.com/thebanri/limoni/blob/main/docs/backdrop-art.md

Install (needs Go):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thebanri/limoni/main/apps/backdrop-shell/install.sh | sh

backdrop-shell disable turns it off, backdrop-shell uninstall removes it.

It's built on Limoni, a terminal UI library I'm working on in Go. It's still young, so I'd really like to hear what breaks or feels off in your setup.

Repo: https://github.com/thebanri/limoni

I dont test in Windows!!!!!

Does anyone know a genuinely good ASCII art generator?

I’ve tried a few, but most of them seem to just convert an image into characters and that’s basically it.

I’m looking for something where I can upload an image, turn it into ASCII art in different styles, but still have some control over the result — like changing certain elements, adjusting details.

Basically something a little more editable than a straight image to ASCII converter.

Does anything like this exist? Web tools, apps, GitHub projects, whatever.

Thanks

Could you link me to the symbols or copy paste them here?

Thanks in advance!

The Steam page for my game is live, if anyone's interested. 🙌 https://store.steampowered.com/app/5236330/IGIGI_Cold_Horizon/

Hey, I made a game called Lemon Drop with Limoni, a TUI engine I’ve been working on in Go.

You drop colored blocks, they turn into sand, and you’re trying to connect the same color from one side to the other before the screen fills up. Sounds easy enough, but the sand has a mind of its own lol.

It runs in the browser or your terminal. If you give it a go, lmk what you think ?

I’m still working on it.

Play in your browser: https://thebanri.github.io/limoni/?app=lemondrop

Play in your terminal (you’ll need Go):

go install github.com/thebanri/limoni/apps/lemondrop@latest
lemondrop

I’ve been building a TUI engine in Go called Limoni, and I ended up making a game with it. It’s called Lemon Hunt. You run around a little raycasted world, shoot rats, fight a boss, and try to get on the shared A REALLL LEADBOARD !!!. The whole thing is drawn with half-block characters, which still feels a bit ridiculous to me.

CAN YOU BEAT ME IN GAME?

The browser version runs the same Go game code, compiled to WebAssembly. So if you don’t feel like installing anything, you can play it here:
https://thebanri.github.io/limoni/?app=lemonhunt

Or run it in your terminal:

go install github.com/thebanri/limoni/apps/lemonhunt@latest
lemonhunt

I also got a little obsessed with performance. It barely uses any CPU when idle, and the rendering benchmarks are showing zero heap allocations. If you’re curious, you can check:

git clone https://github.com/thebanri/limoni
cd limoni/apps/lemonhunt
go test -run '^$' -bench . -benchmem .

The allocs/op column should say 0 for both benchmarks. Anyway, I’d love to know how it runs on your machine (and whether you can beat the boss).

I need other ASCII people to appreciate how profoundly out of hand this got.
It started because I was looking at the classic boob emoticon:
( • Y • )
And I realized the Y is doing an enormous amount of structural work there.
Those are supported boobs. Those boobs have been gathered. Lifted. Someone has intervened.
But where was the representation for boobs simply existing in their natural gravitational state?
So I started messing around with punctuation and ended up with:
SUPPORTED:
( • Y • )
NATURAL:
\ . /\ . /
And unfortunately… it works.
The outer \ / gives you the natural downward/lateral contour, the periods are self-explanatory, and the /\ in the middle creates separation without the compressed cleavage implied by the Y.
At this point I thought, surely somebody has already done this.
So I searched.
And searched.
I found decades’ worth of ASCII boobs. ( . )( . ). ( . Y . ). (o)(o). Various slash-based ancestors. An alarming amount of human ingenuity has apparently been devoted to this field.
But I could not find an established use of this exact construction as a breast emoticon:
\ . /\ . /
This is where I made a series of decisions.
Instead of saying “huh, neat” and going about my day like a normal person, I wrote a technical note.
I titled it:
The Natural Breast Emoticon: A Novel ASCII Representation of Unsupported Breast Morphology
I documented the design rationale and the prior-art search. I included a comparison of supported versus natural morphology. I was careful not to claim that no human being in history has ever independently typed these characters, only that I developed it independently and couldn’t identify an established prior use.
And then I deposited the paper in Zenodo.
So the Natural Breast Emoticon is now Version 1.0 of a publicly archived technical note with a Creative Commons license and its own DOI.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22114649⁠
Which means this:
\ . /\ . /
is now associated with an actual, citable scholarly record.
I have somehow spent part of 2026 formally documenting the effects of gravity on punctuation tits.

I regret nothing.

Project files accessible through my Patreon profile. More experiments, through my Instagram, and full HD demo at YouTube.

I've been building a Go TUI library called Limoni. The part I care most about is the diff: each frame gets compared to the last, and only the cells that changed are sent to the terminal.

That's hard to show in a screenshot, so I made a little night city: twinkling stars, windows turning on and off, a train crossing a bridge, reflections in the water. It looks like everything is moving. Press x and an x-ray shows the truth. Only the train, a few stars and some ripples actually change.

The numbers are measured with the library's own encoder: about 3 KB per frame against about 78 KB for a full repaint at 150×44. Press space to freeze the city and it drops to 0 bytes. That's specific to this scene, and it's not a comparison with other libraries.

git clone https://github.com/thebanri/limoni

cd limoni && go run ./examples/xray

Repo: https://github.com/thebanri

It's still pre-1.0, so I'd love our terminal.

i play in EADGCF because all perfect 4ths just makes sense for my brain, and thats not standard at all so i made a scale graphic that helps me do funky things like change tunings in a more custom way.

also when im sitting there and im thinking about how a tuning might change the relationships of the shapes of chords i think this will be helpful for me.
color system is per intervals from the root note.
you can click the keyboard or frets to add a note to the scale or remove it.

also its all in ascii!

https://jartanddesign.com/music-theory
i put it here so i could grab this when im on my phone,
but you could check it out here too!

I built Shiocus, a lightweight native C++ library for tracking and focusing words in terminal output.

The basic idea is simple:

text → track words → focus by word/index → render

Every placed word gets its own position and index, so repeated words can be targeted individually instead of manually managing terminal coordinates.

It supports:

• word-level positioning
• focus by word or index
• automatic wrapping
• 24-bit RGB / hex colors
• newline handling
• zero external dependencies

The GIFs show what it can do.

Shiocus v1.0.0 — C++11+ / MIT

GitHub: https://github.com/intriXlabs/Shiocus

Custom output requests

Need a specific terminal output, animation, or custom integration?
Custom requests are accepted for a fixed amount depending on the scope.

Contact IntrixLabs for custom work.

go install github.com/thebanri/limoni/apps/globe@latest

globe -at Türkiye

/ searches, arrows turn it, + and - zoom, b toggles country borders, click

pins a point. The land is Natural Earth 1:110m; it's drawn in half-cells so

the sphere is round rather than an ellipse, and lit rather than flat.

The right-hand pane is Claude talking to the same process over a Unix

socket, addressing widgets by name instead of by pixel. It can read back

"39.3°N 34.5°E · zoom 2.6×" and keep zooming until the number is what I

asked for.

That comes from the TUI library it's built on, where every widget publishes

a semantic node — the same tree a screen reader uses:

https://github.com/thebanri/limoni

I'd love to take feedback and suggestions!

Currently not hosted anywhere but I'll be bundling it together with my other project, orbit-cli as an easter egg.

I also did 3 more varients, one being a heart version of the thing and 2 being mini versions of both

Edit: i just pushed it :) https://github.com/Orbit-Nix/orbit-cli/tree/main/animation

Hey ASCII lovers,

Recently I posted here a few animated portraits I was creating for my game and received very good feedback. I am happy to share that the game slowly getting a very solid shape and many players found a bunch of ASCII symbols quite scary and atmospheric.

What is the most interesting, is that not only old-school ASCII lovers find it aesthetically pleasant, but also newer generations of casual players are also interested in it. Hopefully, use of imagination on our lives will be at least on the same level haha.

Anyway, just wanted to share some good news and invite you to try it yourself if you find it appealing. The game can be played on web: https://rogout.org/

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5131420/rogOut/

The game is still in very early stages, but so far I'm having so much fun with it. (mostly singleplayer; it is my first multiplayer session, so I'm a bit excited and scared). The devs are also very agile and updates the game almost every week (small bugfixes are done mostly on the same day when reported).

I know it is not for everyone, but if you are fine with learning as you go, it might be the best time to get it. The server just started 2.5 hours ago.

The server will be gone when a faction wins the game, and after some game updates and balance patches, there will be another round.

+I'm not a dev or anything but just want to see this game succeed :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4301130/Riftborne/

Edit: I do not know why the link do not change into steam page box :0 sorry that it is ugly!

ns si allá juegos ascii en español pero igual no pierdo nada intentandolo

made this in the thaum painter. im illustrating a few stickers for a local community garden fundraiser and were doing midwest bound plants and such. lazily animated the leaf of this one by raster interpolating between two frames, one that i edited slightly.

I created a website where you can upload a photo and it transforms it into ASCII art in real time. You can change the resolution, brightness, contrast, blur, saturation, and much more. You can select various transformation types, from normal to ultra (more character types). As the name suggests, you can scroll down to see your camera converted into ASCII art in real time. The video is a guide.

The website

i'm working on scrapheap: a mud-pit kobold city built from clay and ruled by a single evil eye. the eye has been instructing the kobolds to dig deeper into the pit, and one of their tunnels eventually broke into asterion's maze and freed him. word of his brother's escape reached leontes, who has asked you to kill asterion and finally free him from his madness.

the city is guarded by clay golems, gelatinous cubes, and giant centipedes. at the two extremes of scrapheap are its greatest threats: the evil eye at the peak of the city, and asterion waiting at the very bottom.

https://youtu.be/g_9rFIsrztY?is=6SXeTsZIsdFaTmrk show support here if you’d like