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 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.
I enjoyed this new one.
https://16colo.rs/pack/codi_01/CODI01.ans
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/
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
some previous discussion:
2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44665816