ANSI art is still alive. We have some great modern editors, like Moebius, Durdraw, Icydraw and Pablodraw.
Some of them, like Durdraw, have fully embraced the extended Unicode character set (Utf-8 encoding instead of IBM's Code Page 437) and extended colors (xterm 256 colors instead of the traditional 16 colors), keeping ANSI art relevant and viable into the foreseeable future.
People are making logos and assets for their modern TUI apps and games, for example. Neovim themes. Ly display manager wallpapers.
I am personally glad to see that the medium is coming back into relevance. It was such a fun part of digital culture and creativity in the 90s. I hope the next generation gets to experience some of that thanks to modern tooling, instead of just observed as a relic of the past.
Edit: There is also a debate as to whether Unicode/Utf-8 characters with ANSI and Xterm escape codes constitutes "ANSI art." Some are calling it "UNSI art," or just modern terminal art.
Also, shout-out to the CP437 ANSI artists who continue to evolve the artistic styles of the medium, push the envelope, and release new ANSI packs. Hard, valuable work.
"ANSI Art" has been the true problem name all along. "ASCII Art" used the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.
Even if one took it to mean using ECMA 35 and ECMA 48 escape and control sequences, which wholly forgets the likes of Avatar and PCBoard, "ANSI Art" usually did not actually use any ECMA 35 character set switching, instead relying upon SAUCE data and suchlike and using IBM's (not ANSI's nor ECMA's) rather different code page system and 8-bit character sets, and usually furthermore misinterpreted ECMA 48 SGR sequences when it came to blinking, bright, faint, and bold.
If people are preferring "XTerm Art" or "Terminal Art" for what is made nowadays, that seems to be a nomenclature change for the better.
ANSI art is still alive. We have some great modern editors, like Moebius, Durdraw, Icydraw and Pablodraw.
Some of them, like Durdraw, have fully embraced the extended Unicode character set (Utf-8 encoding instead of IBM's Code Page 437) and extended colors (xterm 256 colors instead of the traditional 16 colors), keeping ANSI art relevant and viable into the foreseeable future.
People are making logos and assets for their modern TUI apps and games, for example. Neovim themes. Ly display manager wallpapers.
I am personally glad to see that the medium is coming back into relevance. It was such a fun part of digital culture and creativity in the 90s. I hope the next generation gets to experience some of that thanks to modern tooling, instead of just observed as a relic of the past.
Edit: There is also a debate as to whether Unicode/Utf-8 characters with ANSI and Xterm escape codes constitutes "ANSI art." Some are calling it "UNSI art," or just modern terminal art.
Also, shout-out to the CP437 ANSI artists who continue to evolve the artistic styles of the medium, push the envelope, and release new ANSI packs. Hard, valuable work.
"ANSI Art" has been the true problem name all along. "ASCII Art" used the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.
Even if one took it to mean using ECMA 35 and ECMA 48 escape and control sequences, which wholly forgets the likes of Avatar and PCBoard, "ANSI Art" usually did not actually use any ECMA 35 character set switching, instead relying upon SAUCE data and suchlike and using IBM's (not ANSI's nor ECMA's) rather different code page system and 8-bit character sets, and usually furthermore misinterpreted ECMA 48 SGR sequences when it came to blinking, bright, faint, and bold.
If people are preferring "XTerm Art" or "Terminal Art" for what is made nowadays, that seems to be a nomenclature change for the better.
For the broader field I tend to use the term “character-cell art”.
My favorite ASCII art group is Galza, some examples:
https://16colo.rs/pack/galza-13/Shd-dphn.ans
https://16colo.rs/pack/galza-13/zj-humming.txt
I enjoyed this new one.
https://16colo.rs/pack/codi_01/CODI01.ans
I really LOVE these things.
One group that still releases ascii and uploads to 16colo.rs is Impure.
They also make demos and won 2nd place at the Evoke demo party this year with the following ascii style demo:
https://demozoo.org/productions/396656/
See also https://artpacks.org
I actually pushed a lot of updates to it just this past week. There's keyboard and swipe/gesture navigation, too.
some previous discussion:
2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44665816