Welcome to "Asciiville" -- a massive collection of Ascii art and Linux terminal utilities

Because ASCII is cool.

A new project provides a large collection of pre-existing, Linux command line utilities — ranging from ASCII art tools to email and games — and compliments those with collections of ASCII art. Topped off with a stylized, ASCII menu system for accessing everything.

Welcome… to Asciiville.

The documentation for Asciiville describes itself thusly:

Asciiville is where you go for ASCII Art, animations, and utilities. The Asciiville project provides integration and extension of several packages as well as providing convenience commands to invoke a variety of components used to display ASCII Art, animations, and text based utilities to perform common operations in a text-only environment.

Asciiville is, in a way, almost a complete distribution of terminal software… with a heavy emphasis on ASCII art style.

The developer has created a “Welcome to Asciiville” video that reminds me ASCII / ANSI art demo videos from years past. For Asciiville… style is king. And that’s not a bad thing.

Asciiville integration is provided for a whole bunch of different command line tools. Many of these are worth checking out and using by themselves (even if you decide to not use them as part of the Asciiville project).

• btop, character based system monitor

• cbftp, character based FTP client

• ddgr, command line web search

• jrnl, a simple command line journal application

• w3m, another character based web browser

• lynx, character based web browser

• mutt, character based email client

• neomutt, character based email client

• newsboat, character based RSS feed reader

• ranger, character based file manager

• gdu, character based disk usage analyzer

• got, text based translation tool

• mpcplus, featureful ncurses based Music Player client

• mplayer, a media player

• asciimatics - automatically display a variety of character based animation effects

• asciinema - automatically create ascii character based video clips

• rainbowstream - command line character based Twitter client

  • See the rainbowstream usage manual to get started

• mapscii, zoomable map of the world

• cmatrix, screen from "The Matrix"

• nethack, ASCII text dungeon game

• ninvaders, ASCII text version of Space Invaders

• tetris, ASCII text version of Tetris

• tmux, a terminal multiplexer

• wttr.in, console-oriented weather report

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Want more ASCII / ANSI art gaming? Check out Linux Tycoon 3, available as an added perk for all subscribers to The Lunduke Journal.