ASCII Me

Over the past couple months, I’ve noticed a wave of ASCII-related projects show up on my feeds. WTH is ASCII? It’s the basic set of letters, numbers, and symbols that old-school computers agreed to use for text.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) has 128 characters:

• 95 printable characters: digits 0–9, uppercase A–Z, lowercase a–z, space, and common punctuation and symbols.
• 33 control characters: non-printing codes like NUL, LF (line feed), CR (carriage return), and DEL used historically for devices like teletypes and printers.

Early internet users who remember plain text-only email and Usenet newsgroups would have encountered ASCII art like these:

 /\_/\
( o.o )
 > ^ <

It’s a cat. Artist unknown.

   __/\\\\\\\\\\\\\____/\\\\\\\\\\\\\_______/\\\\\\\\\\\___
    _\/\\\/////////\\\_\/\\\/////////\\\___/\\\/////////\\\_
     _\/\\\_______\/\\\_\/\\\_______\/\\\__\//\\\______\///__
      _\/\\\\\\\\\\\\\\__\/\\\\\\\\\\\\\\____\////\\\_________
       _\/\\\/////////\\\_\/\\\/////////\\\______\////\\\______
        _\/\\\_______\/\\\_\/\\\_______\/\\\_________\////\\\___
         _\/\\\_______\/\\\_\/\\\_______\/\\\__/\\\______\//\\\__
          _\/\\\\\\\\\\\\\/__\/\\\\\\\\\\\\\/__\///\\\\\\\\\\\/___
           _\/////////////____\/////////////______\///////////_____

Dimensional lettering.

Anyway, you’ve seen it before and get the gist. My guess is that with Claude Code’s halo effect, the terminal is making a comeback and generating interest in this long lost artform again. And it’s text-based which is now fuel for AI.

Alex Harri goes on a deep dive on trying to make rendering images with ASCII better. It’s an interesting project and post, complete with pretty animations and comparisons, leading us through his thinking.

If you want to watch and customize some hypnotic animated ASCII clouds, Caidan Williams has got you covered. Similar to the sci-fi interface maker by Braz De Pina, he made a playground to generate cloud animations using ASCII characters.

So this one is a little older, but I just came across it recently. Heikki Lotvonen created Glyph Drawing Club, a “modular” paint program as he describes it. You use glyphs—whether they’re ASCII characters or fancier shapes—to create images.

Lotvonen is somewhat of an expert in text-based art, writing his BA thesis on Amiga ASCII art. In it, he traces the history of text art, from calligrams to Jewish micro-calligraphy to art on typewriters and teletype machines. Then, of course, on computers.

He clarifies that the term “ASCII art” is somewhat misleading:

Most ASCII art, however, is crafted using extended 8-bit or higher character sets. The most renowned forms of ASCII art are 7-bit ASCII art, ANSI art, Amiga ASCII, ATASCII, PETSCII, Shift_JIS, teletext, and Unicode art. Each employs a distinct character set and often a specific font to craft the images.

Mermaid diagrams are making a comeback too because of LLMs and Markdown. These diagrams are flow charts described in text and then rendered.

flowchart TD
	A[Christmas] -->|Get money| B(Go shopping)
	B --> C{Let me think}
	C -->|One| D[Laptop]
	C -->|Two| E[iPhone]
	C -->|Three| F[fa:fa-car Car]

The above gets rendered as…

So the that’s the official Mermaid rendering engine. The folks behind the Craft notes app made their spin on the rendering with Beautiful Mermaid.

Mermaid diagrams made more beautiful.

Mike Bespalov made Mockdown, an ASCII wireframe generator and editor. You can use AI to generate quick, suuuuuper lo-fi wires, or draw them yourself.

Hmm, looks spot-on!

Alexander Belanger, cofounder of Hatchet, a data pipeline orchestrator, built a terminal UI for their product in two days using Claude Code. The TUI was built to give users a faster, more comfortable way to work that feels more performant than the existing web UI while still having the same functionality.

I love this comment [positive user feedback about the TUI], because it gets at the heart of why I love TUIs - they just feel easier to use, even though it uses the exact same API as the UI. They’re also the opposite of how web applications have been trending the past few years: TUIs are text-first, information-dense, and most importantly, they live inline to your code, preventing constant tab switching. And since our users are primarily developing Hatchet tasks and durable workflows in their IDE, we wanted to provide an experience where workflows could be visualized and run from a terminal, instead of constantly switching between your code and your browser.

Belanger’s view that TUIs are more performant is spot on. As designers, we need to remember that sometimes, less is more, especially when it’s about getting work done.

Last, but not least, here’s a fun terminal app that uses ASCII animation to show real-time weather. It’s called Weathr, and is built by a dev named Veirt.

Terminal UIs are having a moment and us old timers are feeling lots of nostalgia about it.