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TooTallNate/ansi-canvas

★ 585 · JavaScript · updated Jul 2016

Render a <canvas> node to your terminal

ansi-canvas wraps node-canvas so you can draw to the terminal using the standard 2D Canvas API — fillRect, fillText, drawImage, the whole thing. It auto-sizes to the terminal dimensions and flushes pixels as ANSI escape codes. Mostly a curiosity and a building block for terminal visualizations.

Uses the real HTML Canvas 2D API, so anything that works in a browser canvas works here without relearning an alternative drawing model. The auto-resize to terminal dimensions is a nice touch. The examples (bouncing ball, clock, image viewer) show it actually works for non-trivial use cases.

Last commit was 2016 — it depends on node-canvas, which has had significant breaking changes since then and requires native compilation, making installation fragile on modern Node versions. There's no animation loop, double-buffering, or diff-based rendering, so rapidly updating the whole terminal flickers badly. The 585-star repo has 30 forks and no active maintainers; if node-canvas breaks your build, you're on your own.

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