ansi.hrtk.in – play ANSI art over HTTP or Gemini

2020-08-05 / 2 mins read

I've written a bunch of Gemini related code this past month. Now I ported one tech demo over to HTTP. It's an ANSI art player that emulates modem download speed and tries its best to look good on modern terminals (ie. charset conversion and clipping to 80 columns).

I recommend trying it with curl in a terminal. Alternatively, click the button to see a "video" (ie. asciinema recording).

curl ansi.hrtk.in/ungenannt_motherofsorrows.ans

Show demo with asciinema player (this runs a ~150kB script from asciinema.org)

The art is from https://16colo.rs/ – all ANSI art files there are mirrored and available by filename. The code is AGPLv3 and available at the /source url on the site, and, at the moment, Github.

The site is really built with Gemini in mind and the HTTP server is a hacky afterthought. Of course you need a streaming-capable gemini client; my current favorite is gemget.

For some yo dawg moments, try my Gemini asciinema player with gemget ;)

gemget -o- gemini://asciinema.hrtk.in/351771