con-dog/clippy

Create animated ASCII-art for the command line almost instantly!

clippy

Create and play colored 🟥🟩🟦 or colorless ⬛️⬜️ animated, or static, ASCII-art in the command line! Tested in CMD only

clippy can help if you are wanting to;

• Develop a rogue-like ASCII game
• Develop word games (animate text)
• Develeop TUI's or CUI's
• Develop a Terminal screensaver
• Create animated logos for your scripts
• Make ASCII-art
• Make coloured ASCII art
• Make animated ASCII art
• Only use the Python standard library!

Applicability

Tested only in CMD on Windows 10

State

OPEN TO CONTRIBUTIONS

Example Animation

Get this clip	From this txt file/s!
	................. ........~...v.... .........../|.... .....v..../_|__.. .........\-----/. ~~~~~~~~~`~~~~~~'

How clippy works

clippy looks at all the txt files in a directory, and sequentially prints each file to the console in the same line/column position. If the color flaf is passed, it maps colors onto each frame.

Each txt file acts as a 'frame' of the clip; Minor variations between these text files creates the animation!

Make your own animations

Steps

1. Create a sub-directory inside the 'art' directory. Eg: under sea/boats. Give it a meaningful name eg: "small_boat_1" for a sailing boat animation

clip
   ├───art
   ├───animals
   ...
   ...
   └───sea
       └───boats
           └───small_boat_1

2. In this folder create 2 sub-directories: 'ascii' and 'color'

clip
   ├───art
   ├───animals
   ...
   ...
   └───sea
       └───boats
           └───small_boat_1
               ├───ascii
               └───color

3. In the 'ascii' sub-directory create a base/template txt file. Your ASCII-art template will live in here. Do it yourself or get ideas from https://www.asciiart.eu/ Eg: your base might have some ASCII-art like this in it (or anything you want!)

 clip
  ├───art
  ├───animals
  ...
  ...
  └───sea
      └───boats
          └───small_boat_1
              ├───ascii
              |       └───small_boat_1a.txt
              |       └───small_boat_1b.txt
              |       ...
              |       ...
              |       └───small_boat_1h.txt
              └───color

The text file might look something like this:

.................
........~...v....
.........../|....
.....v..../_|__..
.........\-----/.
~~~~~~~~~`~~~~~~'

4. Make copies of this file, and in each copy, make some minor changes!

For the example below I've shifted the boat left, and added a seagull:

.....\,/.........
~...v............
.../|............
../_|__..........
.\-----/.........
~`~~~~~~'~~~~~~~~

5. Run clip.py and pass the relative path of the directory containing your txt files (frames), pass it the speed (1-100), and pass it the number of cycles to run (1-1000)

6. Enjoy and contribute your art here! Submit a pull request of your art to this repo!

ROADMAP

1. Update steps and add steps to do color
2. Build library of ASCII-art and animated ASCII-art
3. Auto-colour terminal art
4. Generative ASCII-art

clippy's Issues

Default example doesn't work

Am I doing something wrong? I'm running the code exactly as in the readme.

(base) ryan@sisko~/etc/clippy 13:50:42 $ python clip.py art/sea/boats/small_boat_1/ 100 3 -c
sh: color: command not found
sh: cls: command not found
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "clip.py", line 376, in <module>
    clippy(args.path, args.speed, args.cycles, args.color)
  File "clip.py", line 370, in clippy
    clip = Clip(path, speed, cycles, color)
  File "clip.py", line 205, in __init__
    raise ClipException("""
__main__.ClipException: 
                    Your folder specified by path, must contain a subfolder 
                    called 'ascii'. This ascii subfolder must contain at least 
                    1 txt file. Your folder hierarchy should look similar to:

                    C:.
                    └───art
                        ├───animals
                        ├───buildings
                        │   └───castles
                        ...     └───my_folder
                                    └───ascii
                                        └───my_art_1.txt
                                        └───my_art_2.txt
                                        ...
                                        ...
                                        └───my_art_n.txt

                    
(base) ryan@sisko~/etc/clippy 13:50:43 $ ls art/sea/boats/small_boat_1/ascii/
small_boat_1a.txt	small_boat_1d.txt	small_boat_1g.txt	small_boat_1j.txt	small_boat_1m.txt
small_boat_1b.txt	small_boat_1e.txt	small_boat_1h.txt	small_boat_1k.txt	small_boat_1n.txt
small_boat_1c.txt	small_boat_1f.txt	small_boat_1i.txt	small_boat_1l.txt	small_boat_1o.txt

Thanks for a cute and creative library!