Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

aewan a nice advanced GNU / Linux console ASCII art editor

I'm a guy fascinated by ASCII art, since the very early days I saw a piece of this awesome digital art

As time passed and computers went through the graphics revolution, ASCII art loose its huge popularity it possessed in the early DOS days.
However, surely the ars is higly valued by true computer geeks. In that manner of thoughts, lately I'm researching widely on ASCII art tools and stuff related to Linux.
I haven't done a thorough review on what kind of ASCII related tools are available on Linux, since few years time so recently I decided to closely check.
As a Debian Linux I checked what is available across the Debian installable packages.
My attention was caught by aewan (ASCII-art Editor Without A Name).

Aewan project official website is on sourceforge check it out here

Here is the complete description of the Debian package:

hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show aewan|grep -i description -A 5
Description: ASCII-art Editor Without A Name
aewan is an ASCII art editor with support for multiple layers that can be
edited individually, colors, rectangular copy and paste, and intelligent
horizontal and vertical flipping (converts '\' to '/', etc). It produces
both stand-alone art files and an easy-to-parse format for integration
into your terminal applications.


I installed it to give it a try:

noah:~# apt-get --yes install aewan
Selecting previously deselected package aewan.
(Reading database ... 388522 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking aewan (from .../aewan_1.0.01-3_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up aewan (1.0.01-3) ...


aewan package provides three executable binaries:

noah:~# dpkg -L aewan|grep -i /bin/ /usr/bin/aecat
/usr/bin/aewan
/usr/bin/aemakeflic


1. aewan binary is the ascii-art editor itself

2. aecat is utility to display an aewan documents (aewan format saved files) 3. aemakeflic - tool to produce an animation from an aewan document

I ran in my console tty aewan, to check it out immediately after install:

hipo@noah:~$ aewan


Below are screenshots to give you an idea how powerful aewan is:



Aewan immediate entry screen after start up



Aewan ASCII art editor - all of the supported tool functions

As you can see from the shot the editor is very feature rich. I was stunned to find out it even supports layers (in ASCII!!) (w0w!) :)

To use aewan to create my first ASCII art I choose:

New


This didn't immediately show the prompt, where I can use the ascii characters to draw my picture, but in order to be able to draw inside the editor, its necessery to open at least one layer, through using the menu:

Add Layer (defaults)


While an ASCII art is created with the editor you can select the color of the input characters by using Drawing Color menu seen in the above screenshot.



I've played few minutes and created a sample ascii art, just to test the color and editor "look & feel", my conclusions are its behaviour while drawing with chars is awesome:



All the commands available via menus are also accessible via a shortcut key combinations:



aewan controls are just great and definitely over-shadows every other text editor I used to draw an ASCII art.
Once saved the ASCII art, are by default saved in a plain gzipped ascii. You can therefore simply zcat the the saves;
Don't expect zcat to show you the ascii as it was visible in aewan, zcat-ing it will instead will display just the stored meta data which can be interpreted and displayed properly only with aecat



I've checked online for rpm builds too and such are available, so installing on Fedora, CentOS, SuSE etc. is up to downloading the right distro rpm package and running:

# rpm -ivh aewan*.rpm


On the official website, there are also instructions to compile from source, Slackware users and users of other distros which doesn't have a build should compile manually with the usual:

$ tar -zxf aewan-1.0.01.tar.gz
$ cd aewan-1.0.01
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -c "make install"


For those inrested to make animations with aemakeflic you need to first save a multiple layers of pictures moves pretty much like the old school way to make animation "draw every scene" from the anime as a different layer and then use the aemakeflic to export all the ASCII layers as one video.

aemakeflic has the ability to export the ASCII animation in a simple shell script which displays the animation while executed, or some kind of other format that can be played with less command.
Making ASCII animation takes a lot of time and effort. Since i'm too lazy and I lack the time I didn't tested this functionality, but I've seen some ascii videos over telnet in the past and I guess they were made using aewan.

I will close this post with a nice colorful ASCII art, made with aewan (taken from the project page):