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Hacker News Show HN: Web-based ANSI art viewer

My love letter to ANSI art. Full width rendering, scrolling by baud rate, text is selectable, and more.

27
Traction Score
7
Discussions
Mar 13, 2026
Launch Date
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Product Positioning & Context

AI Executive Synthesis
My love letter to ANSI art. Full width rendering, scrolling by baud rate, text is selectable, and more.
This is a highly specialized tool catering to a niche historical computing aesthetic. Its value is purely nostalgic and artistic, providing a modern web interface for viewing legacy ANSI art. The technical implementation focuses on faithful rendering and user experience for this specific content type. Market implications: This product holds no B2B SaaS relevance. It serves a hobbyist or enthusiast community. There are no discernible market trends or developer pain points addressed that translate into a viable B2B offering.
My love letter to ANSI art. Full width rendering, scrolling by baud rate, text is selectable, and more.There are some example links at the top if you're feeling lucky.
ANSI art full width rendering scrolling by baud rate text is selectable

Community Voice & Feedback

ezpzai • Mar 13, 2026
[dead]
gwbas1c • Mar 12, 2026
I love this! I ran a dial-up BBS in the 1990s and still have a soft spot for ANSI. It was like looking at LiteBrite for computer nerds.Thanks a million!
kristopolous • Mar 12, 2026
Really I'd love to see animations from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw work.
raldi • Mar 12, 2026
This is very cool! And I say that as someone who was in iCE in the early 1990s ;)The baud scrolling and SAUCE support are nicely done, and "drag a zip here" is top-tier magic, though when I tried dragging in an old iCE pack's zip file, it only showed one ANSI inside there; I was expecting a file picker.Feature suggestions: "Show invisible text" toggle and an option to switch between 16-color background mode and 8-color background mode with blink support. You're already parsing the SAUCE which has an "iCE colors" boolean; you can use this to control the default for the latter setting.Details: https://forum.16colo.rs/t/ice-colors-or-blinking-text/27
lubujackson • Mar 12, 2026
Creator here - this was much more technically difficult than it seems, because rendering pixel perfect backgrounds with scaling width is non-obvious. Hit 'Esc' and you can set some options, including changing the background pattern.If you want to see a big file, I have a direct link to load the Blocktronics WTF4 ANSI which is over 4000 lines: https://sure.is/ansi/?wtf4=1

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