It's such a beautiful project. The telnet access, the supported zoom and scroll gestures...
I once heavily hacked the (very!) well organized and readable code to send the vector features -- the roads -- to an Arduino that was generating a TV signal. I actually used two Arduinos, one showing text labels only, the other one for line features.
MapSCII was programmed to slowly pan between two of my homes (between Quebec City and Montreal), along the highway connecting these cities. The pan was in real time -- 300km in about 3 hours. I've been going back and forth between these cities for many years. This art piece, named "Contrecœur" (a city name along the way, and also "against one's heart" in French) was a digital contemplative take on this.
I've recently been looking into terminals that can show images properly - and it's looking more widely supported and maturing than I thought.
Is there anyone else also looking into the same thing?
It's promising but my main problem is that the multiplexers tmux and screen don't really support the various protocols.
There are some terminals that support images using various protocols:
- Xterm - Sixel (but not built with it in your distro, maybe)
- Gnome-terminal/libvte terminals - Sixel - not released yet/not available to me, so unconfirmed
Using this support one can for example configure IPython to render images in the terminal inline using its mime-type hooks.
It would be great if we could slowly move terminals forward with this (even if I understand the technology is quite cumbersome to work with). Imagine having neovim, IPython or jupyter notebooks etc all available with image support in a multiplexed terminal.
Given the terminals you listed above, I assume you are referring to something very specific when you say "show images properly". However, there is a lot more flexibility to use the terminal of your choice (not to mention compatibility with other programs like tmux) if you don't need pixel-perfect reproduction.
For example, I made an image browser for the terminal [0] based on Terminal Image Viewer [1] (for most image formats) and catimg [2] (for animated GIFs) that doesn't require installing a new terminal. It works great with tmux and SSH and I use it all the time for this purpose (though I didn't initially expect to find it so useful).
YMMV, but I have found that the image quality provided by TIV for example is more than sufficient for the kinds of use cases I tend to have when in a console session and needing to quickly view one or more images. Mostly that involves quickly identifying a particular image file among others in a directory, but it's so much easier to not have to leave the terminal and change contexts that it's often more convenient to reach for it for more general tasks too. Any tradeoff in quality is more than made up for in my view by the convenience of being able to use my regular terminal.
Googles hterm also supports the iTerm2 protocol. Can be good for embedding a terminal in a slideshow presentation.
If your language has a REPL with appropriate control over the display of objects you can get a pretty great experience. I used it to get familiar with Haskell's diagrams and JuicyPixel libraries and it was great[0].
Yes, I'm looking for something that can display plots like a jupyter notebook could so the low resolution solutions don't really cut it. Maybe it's good as a fallback, though..
This is using the iTerm2 protocol from the REPL. So it's high resolution. For example all the plots in this Haskell tutorial [0] can be plotted in your terminal from the REPL while you are developing and the appear as they do in the PDF.
That video zoomed in to a place 200m from my house (near C-Base, Berlin). It felt totally natural (of course I'll zoom to my house!) and only when it deviated slightly from my actual home did it seem weird (wait, It's not me who zoomed to my house).
this is great. I have been looking for map alternatives to google and apple. this is great for those times when all you have is a shell and no Gui. very nice. will bookmark and remember this.
When on a bike ride between Spain and France but you only have 2G connection from your termux session to the tmux session running mapscii on your VPS. Google maps would timeout and you can't download a billion gigabyte map file.
Just use OSMand from FDroid and download the offline maps. The just use the GPS.
That's what I did with my GF at the French Basque Country in order to avoid paying roaming fees.
The map files for a few provinces don't occupy more than few GB's. I think the whole map of Spain was about 3GB.
It's a subgenre of games that has some combination of roleplaying, ASCII graphics (or low resolution bitmaps without animation), procedural content generation and perma-death. Most well known are NetHack and Dwarf Fortress.
People tend to enjoy them for two very different reasons. First is that focus on things other than graphics tends to improve depth and re-playability. Second is that without graphics, the player's imagination plays large part in building world. It's bit more like reading a book than watching a movie.
I once heavily hacked the (very!) well organized and readable code to send the vector features -- the roads -- to an Arduino that was generating a TV signal. I actually used two Arduinos, one showing text labels only, the other one for line features.
MapSCII was programmed to slowly pan between two of my homes (between Quebec City and Montreal), along the highway connecting these cities. The pan was in real time -- 300km in about 3 hours. I've been going back and forth between these cities for many years. This art piece, named "Contrecœur" (a city name along the way, and also "against one's heart" in French) was a digital contemplative take on this.
A video, if anyone's curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrTbg49Tx7k
@rastapasta, thanks a lot for your work!