I’ve made a ios free app for ascii fx

I’ve been working on this little Android app called Ascii Art Generator.

You can pick a photo or take one with your camera, crop it, choose different ASCII styles, adjust the settings, and export the result as a PNG. There’s also a history section so you can revisit things you’ve made.

It started as a small experiment but it turned into something I’ve been having a lot of fun with.

If you try it, I’d love to hear what you think, especially about the rendering and what features you’d like to see next!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.asciiart.app&pcampaignid=web_share

(iOS coming soon 👀)

If you're interested here is the steam page

painted this apple out last night after doodling a bunch of them for inktober.

Support here! https://youtube.com/@frish__?si=xPmT6ya8960OYdl4

1.0 release to steam in 2027.

I've always liked the terminal setups with animated backgrounds, but my terminal (Alacritty) can't do that. So I wrote a small wrapper, backdrop-shell, that runs your shell in front of a moving scene: an aurora, a night city, a starfield, a synthwave sunset, a picture, or your own ASCII art that blinks or drifts.

A terminal has no layers, so it can't just draw "behind" your shell. The wrapper runs the shell itself and draws its text over the scene. Your text stays sharp, and selecting only copies what you typed, not the stars behind it.

It costs about half a percent of one CPU core and nothing when the window isn't focused. You can change the opacity or the scene live in every open terminal (backdrop-shell opacity 0.3).

You can directly upload an image or design your own ASCII animation.

I make a little guide for this: https://github.com/thebanri/limoni/blob/main/docs/backdrop-art.md

Install (needs Go):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thebanri/limoni/main/apps/backdrop-shell/install.sh | sh

backdrop-shell disable turns it off, backdrop-shell uninstall removes it.

It's built on Limoni, a terminal UI library I'm working on in Go. It's still young, so I'd really like to hear what breaks or feels off in your setup.

Repo: https://github.com/thebanri/limoni

I dont test in Windows!!!!!

Does anyone know a genuinely good ASCII art generator?

I’ve tried a few, but most of them seem to just convert an image into characters and that’s basically it.

I’m looking for something where I can upload an image, turn it into ASCII art in different styles, but still have some control over the result — like changing certain elements, adjusting details.

Basically something a little more editable than a straight image to ASCII converter.

Does anything like this exist? Web tools, apps, GitHub projects, whatever.

Thanks

Could you link me to the symbols or copy paste them here?

Thanks in advance!

The Steam page for my game is live, if anyone's interested. 🙌 https://store.steampowered.com/app/5236330/IGIGI_Cold_Horizon/

Hey, I made a game called Lemon Drop with Limoni, a TUI engine I’ve been working on in Go.

You drop colored blocks, they turn into sand, and you’re trying to connect the same color from one side to the other before the screen fills up. Sounds easy enough, but the sand has a mind of its own lol.

It runs in the browser or your terminal. If you give it a go, lmk what you think ?

I’m still working on it.

Play in your browser: https://thebanri.github.io/limoni/?app=lemondrop

Play in your terminal (you’ll need Go):

go install github.com/thebanri/limoni/apps/lemondrop@latest
lemondrop

I’ve been building a TUI engine in Go called Limoni, and I ended up making a game with it. It’s called Lemon Hunt. You run around a little raycasted world, shoot rats, fight a boss, and try to get on the shared A REALLL LEADBOARD !!!. The whole thing is drawn with half-block characters, which still feels a bit ridiculous to me.

CAN YOU BEAT ME IN GAME?

The browser version runs the same Go game code, compiled to WebAssembly. So if you don’t feel like installing anything, you can play it here:
https://thebanri.github.io/limoni/?app=lemonhunt

Or run it in your terminal:

go install github.com/thebanri/limoni/apps/lemonhunt@latest
lemonhunt

I also got a little obsessed with performance. It barely uses any CPU when idle, and the rendering benchmarks are showing zero heap allocations. If you’re curious, you can check:

git clone https://github.com/thebanri/limoni
cd limoni/apps/lemonhunt
go test -run '^$' -bench . -benchmem .

The allocs/op column should say 0 for both benchmarks. Anyway, I’d love to know how it runs on your machine (and whether you can beat the boss).

I need other ASCII people to appreciate how profoundly out of hand this got.
It started because I was looking at the classic boob emoticon:
( • Y • )
And I realized the Y is doing an enormous amount of structural work there.
Those are supported boobs. Those boobs have been gathered. Lifted. Someone has intervened.
But where was the representation for boobs simply existing in their natural gravitational state?
So I started messing around with punctuation and ended up with:
SUPPORTED:
( • Y • )
NATURAL:
\ . /\ . /
And unfortunately… it works.
The outer \ / gives you the natural downward/lateral contour, the periods are self-explanatory, and the /\ in the middle creates separation without the compressed cleavage implied by the Y.
At this point I thought, surely somebody has already done this.
So I searched.
And searched.
I found decades’ worth of ASCII boobs. ( . )( . ). ( . Y . ). (o)(o). Various slash-based ancestors. An alarming amount of human ingenuity has apparently been devoted to this field.
But I could not find an established use of this exact construction as a breast emoticon:
\ . /\ . /
This is where I made a series of decisions.
Instead of saying “huh, neat” and going about my day like a normal person, I wrote a technical note.
I titled it:
The Natural Breast Emoticon: A Novel ASCII Representation of Unsupported Breast Morphology
I documented the design rationale and the prior-art search. I included a comparison of supported versus natural morphology. I was careful not to claim that no human being in history has ever independently typed these characters, only that I developed it independently and couldn’t identify an established prior use.
And then I deposited the paper in Zenodo.
So the Natural Breast Emoticon is now Version 1.0 of a publicly archived technical note with a Creative Commons license and its own DOI.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22114649⁠
Which means this:
\ . /\ . /
is now associated with an actual, citable scholarly record.
I have somehow spent part of 2026 formally documenting the effects of gravity on punctuation tits.

I regret nothing.

Project files accessible through my Patreon profile. More experiments, through my Instagram, and full HD demo at YouTube.

I've been building a Go TUI library called Limoni. The part I care most about is the diff: each frame gets compared to the last, and only the cells that changed are sent to the terminal.

That's hard to show in a screenshot, so I made a little night city: twinkling stars, windows turning on and off, a train crossing a bridge, reflections in the water. It looks like everything is moving. Press x and an x-ray shows the truth. Only the train, a few stars and some ripples actually change.

The numbers are measured with the library's own encoder: about 3 KB per frame against about 78 KB for a full repaint at 150×44. Press space to freeze the city and it drops to 0 bytes. That's specific to this scene, and it's not a comparison with other libraries.

git clone https://github.com/thebanri/limoni

cd limoni && go run ./examples/xray

Repo: https://github.com/thebanri

It's still pre-1.0, so I'd love our terminal.