ASCII Art Animator

A desktop app for creating ASCII art animations, frame by frame, with a timeline, playback, and export to GIF, ANSI shell script, or self-running Rust binary.

Built with Tauri 2 + React + TypeScript.

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Download

Grab the installer for your platform from Releases.

Platform	File
Windows	.exe (NSIS) or .msi
macOS (Apple Silicon)	.dmg (aarch64)
macOS (Intel)	.dmg (x86_64)
Linux	.deb or .AppImage

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Features

• Monospace grid canvas: click or drag to place characters
• Pencil, eraser, and flood-fill tools: keyboard shortcuts P / E / F
• Undo / redo: Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z (or Ctrl+Y), 50-step history
• Character palette: pick any ASCII character or type one directly
• ANSI color picker: 16 foreground colors per cell
• Frame timeline: add, duplicate, delete, and reorder frames
• Playback: loop with adjustable FPS
• Onion skinning: previous frame ghosted at reduced opacity
• Export to GIF: animated GIF rendered in-browser, no server needed
• Export to ANSI shell script: self-running .sh that plays the animation in a terminal
• Export to Rust source: compile with rustc animation.rs -o anim && ./anim
• Save / open projects: .aaa project files (JSON)
• Welcome screen with ASCII mandala art

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Building from Source

Prerequisites: Node.js (LTS), pnpm, Rust

git clone https://github.com/rwetz/ascii-art-animator.git
cd ascii-art-animator
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev        # dev server with hot reload
pnpm tauri build      # production build + installer

Linux also requires WebKit2GTK:

sudo apt-get install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libappindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev patchelf

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Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
P	Pencil tool
E	Eraser tool
F	Fill tool
Any character	Set active character
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Ctrl+Shift+Z / Ctrl+Y	Redo
Space	Play / pause

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Project File Format

Projects save as .aaa files (plain JSON):

{
  "version": 1,
  "cols": 80,
  "rows": 24,
  "fps": 8,
  "frames": [
    { "id": "...", "cells": [[{ "char": " ", "color": null }]] }
  ]
}

License

MIT.