- [x] ANSI (.ans) — Note that while it handles many more ANSI control codes when loading than those that it uses to save files, you may have limited success loading other ANSI files that you find on the web, or create with other tools. ANSI files can vary a lot and even encode animations!
- [x] SVG (.svg) — can open SVGs saved by Textual Paint, which embed ANSI data; can also open some other SVGs that consist of a grid of rectangles and text elements. For fun, as a challenge, I made it quite flexible; it can handle uneven grids of unsorted rectangles. But that's only used as a fallback, because it's not perfect.
- [x] Efficient screen updates and undo/redo history, by tracking regions affected by each action
- You could totally use this program over SSH! Haha, this "what if" project could actually be useful. Of course, it should be mentioned that you can also run graphical programs over SSH, but this might be more responsive, or just fit your vibe better.
1.`find samples -type f -exec file --mime-type {} \;`: This part uses the `find` command to locate all files (`-type f`) within the "samples" folder and its subdirectories. For each file, it executes the `file --mime-type` command to determine the file's MIME type. This outputs a line like "samples/ship.ans: text/plain".
2.`grep -v -e "image/png" -e "image/svg"`: This filters out any lines containing the MIME types "image/png" or "image/svg", effectively excluding PNG and SVG files. `-v` means "invert the match", so it will only output lines that don't match the given patterns.
3.`cut -d: -f1`: This extracts only the file paths from the output of the `file` command, removing the MIME type information.
4.`sort`: This sorts the file paths alphabetically.
5.`xargs -I{} sh -c 'echo "File: {}"; cat "{}"; echo "\n-----------------------\n"'`: Finally, this executes the `sh -c` command for each file, echoing the filename, catting its content, and adding a separator line.
This command will sort and display the content of all non-PNG files within the "samples" folder and its subdirectories. Remember to run this command in the directory where the "samples" folder is located.
To preview ANSI art files in file managers like Nautilus, Thunar, Nemo, or Caja, you can install the [ansi-art-thumbnailer](https://github.com/1j01/ansi-art-thumbnailer) program I made to go along with this project.
- Undo/Redo doesn't work inside the Text tool's textbox. Ctrl+Z will delete the textbox. (Also note that the Text tool works differently from MS Paint; it will overwrite characters and the cursor can move freely, which makes it better for ASCII art, but worse for prose.)
- The selection box border appears inside instead of outside (and lacks dashes). For the text box, I hid the border because it was too visually confusing, but it should also have an outer border.
- Pick Color can't be cancelled (with Esc or by pressing both mouse buttons), since it samples the color continuously.
- Pressing both mouse buttons stops the current tool, but doesn't undo the current action.
- Set As Wallpaper may not work on your system. For me, on Ubuntu, the wallpaper setting is updated but the picture is not, unless I manually pick it. There is however untested support for many platforms, and you may have better luck than me.
- If you paste and then stamp the selection with Ctrl+Click, the stamp(s) can't be undone. An undo state is only created when finalizing the selection, for pasted selections.
- ANSI files (.ans) are treated as UTF-8 when saving and loading, rather than CP437 or Windows-1252 or any other encodings. Unicode is nice and modern terminals support it, but it's not the standard for ANSI files. There isn't really a standard for ANSI files.
- ANSI files are loaded with a white background. This may make sense as a default for text files, but ANSI files either draw a background or assume a black background, being designed for terminals.
`--clear-screen` is useful for development, because it's sometimes jarring or perplexing to see error messages that have actually been fixed, when exiting the program.
`--inspect-layout` enables a DOM inspector accessible with F12, which I built. It also lets you apply a rainbow highlight and labels to all ancestors under the mouse with middle click, but this is mostly obsolete/redundant with the DOM inspector now. The labels affect the layout, so you can also hold Ctrl to only colorize, and you can remember how the colors correspond to the labels, to build a mental model of the layout.
`--restart-on-changes` automatically restarts the program when any Python files change. This works by the program restarting itself directly. (Programs like `modd` or `nodemon` that run your program in a subprocess don't work well with Textual's escape sequences.)
The first thing I did in this project was to collect possible characters to represent all the tool icons in MS Paint, to gauge how good of a recreation it would be possible to achieve, starting from looks.
A crosshair cursor could use one of `+✜✛⊹✚╋╬⁘⁛⌖⯐`, but whilst that imitates the look, it might be better to show the pixel under the cursor, i.e. character cell, surrounded by dashes, like this:
- [Playscii](http://vectorpoem.com/playscii/), a beautiful ASCII/ANSI art editor. This is also written in Python and MIT licensed, so I might take some code from it, for converting images to ANSI, for example. Who knows, maybe I could even try to support its file format.
