Tuesday, December 16, 2014

cp437 - bringing high ASCII order to the fucked up world of UTF8

Let's get one thing straight, I absolutely love ANSI graphics. But lately, and by lately I mean since 200X, getting my daily fix of this Graffitti-esque artstyle that had it's glory days in the early 90's has become a bit of a hassle. Sure you can mess around with your charset settings and fonts like I've done, but that will probably affect the usability of the rest of your system... in a negative way.

So when I, as a newcomer to reddit, asked for help in the /r/commandline subreddit I got the answer: cp437 an app so easy to use it's almost painful to think of all the headaches I've had trying to get ANSI to display properly in Linux virtual console and assorted terminal emulators.

After installation it's merely a matter of typing "cp437" followed by the app of your choice for instance:

$ cp437 camp
$ cp437 duhdraw

It even works under GNU screen, to some extent. To be honest I had trouble with getting DuhDraw to paint properly under GNU screen the first time I tried it.

Camp, in all it's properly rendered ANSI glory.
The image is a bit offset because my virtual console is
larger than 80 columns and 25 lines.

CAMP file selection menu.
No there's no little "screen;" thing in the corner. ;)

Quick Ansi doodle in DuhDraw.