___  _____  ____
  / _ \/  _/ |/_/ /____ ______ _      Made with love by Eliuk Blau
 / ___// /_>  </ __/ -_) __/  ' \ https://github.com/eliukblau/pixterm
/_/  /___/_/|_|\__/\__/_/ /_/_/_/                1.3.3

PIXterm - draw images in your ANSI terminal with true color

PIXterm shows images directly in your terminal, recreating the pixels through a combination of ANSI character background color and the unicode lower half block element. If image has transparency, an optional matte color can be used for background. Also, you can specify a dithering mode; in which case, the image is rendered using block elements with different shades, or using standard ASCII characters in the same way. In dithering mode, the matte color is used to fill the background of the blocks or characters.

The conversion process runs fast because it is parallelized in all CPUs.

Supported image formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP.

Fetching images from HTTP/HTTPS is supported too.

Cool Screenshots

No Dithering (Classic Mode)

Dithering with Blocks

Dithering with Characters

Dithering with Background Color Disabled (-nobg)

Requirements

Your terminal emulator must be support true color feature in order to display image colors in a right way. In addition, you must use a monospaced font that includes the lower half block unicode character: ▄ (U+2584). I personally recommend Envy Code R. It's the nice font that shows in the screenshots. If you want to use the dithering mode with blocks, the font must also includes the following unicode characters: █ (U+2588), ▓ (U+2593), ▒ (U+2592), ░ (U+2591). The dithering mode with characters works with standard ASCII chars.

Dependencies

All dependencies are included via standard Go module system. You should not do anything else.

Dependencies for PIXterm CLI tool

• Package colorful: github.com/lucasb-eyer/go-colorful
• Package terminal: golang.org/x/crypto/ssh/terminal

Dependencies for ANSImage Package

• Package colorful: github.com/lucasb-eyer/go-colorful
• Package imaging: github.com/disintegration/imaging
• Package webp: golang.org/x/image/webp
• Package bmp: golang.org/x/image/bmp
• Package tiff: golang.org/x/image/tiff

Installation

You need the Go compiler version 1.25 or higher installed in your system.

Run this command to automatically download sources and install PIXterm binary in your $GOPATH/bin (or $GOBIN) directory:

go install github.com/eliukblau/pixterm/cmd/pixterm@latest

If you're using Arch Linux, Fabius has created an AUR package for PIXterm. Run this command to install it:

yaourt -S pixterm

The previous package called pixterm-git, kindly created by eigengrau, is now orphan. Do not use it.

Local Running/Building

If you have a local copy of this repo, you can run/build the pixterm CLI using the following commands in the repository root:

# run
go run ./cmd/pixterm

# build
go build -o path/for/binary ./cmd/pixterm

About

PIXterm is a terminal toy application that I made to exercise my skills on Go programming language. If you have not tried this language yet, please give it a try! It's easy, fast and very well organized. You'll not regret 😜

This application is originaly inspired by the clever termpix, implemented in Rust.

The dithering mode is my own port of the Processing Textmode Engine's render.

License

Mozilla Public License Version 2.0

Contributors

• @disq

  • Original code for image transparency support.

• @timob

  • Fix for ANSIpixel type: use 8bit color component for output.

• @HongjiangHuang

  • Original code for image download support.

• @brutestack

  • Color support for Windows (Command Prompt & PowerShell).
  • Original code for disable background color in dithering mode.
  • Original code for output Go code to fmt.Print() the image.

• @diamondburned

  • NewFromImage() & NewScaledFromImage() for ANSImage API.

• @MichaelMure

  • More conventional go.mod file at repository.

• @Calinou

  • Use HTTPS URLs everywhere.
  • Other awesome contributions.

• @grisu48

  • Help with updating very old dependencies.