#TextModeTuesday

Karsten Schmidttoxi@mastodon.thi.ng
2026-01-13

For #TextModeTuesday, some fonts from my old demoscene days, recreated in 2022 for an example project of my opensource libraries:

Figlet style text generator using big fonts:
demo.thi.ng/umbrella/big-font/

Font sources (the lines below the characters are kerning pairs):
github.com/thi-ng/umbrella/blo

github.com/thi-ng/umbrella/blo

#TextMode #ASCIIArt #Typography #Font

Screenshot of a proportional text-based typeface, with each character made up of box-drawing characters to create gradients within each letter form.Screenshot of a proportional text-based typeface, with each character made up of box-drawing characters to create gradients within each letter form.
Karsten Schmidttoxi@mastodon.thi.ng
2026-01-06

Welcome to #TextModeTuesday! For the next few weeks I'll be posting some projects & experiments related to this just spontaneously made up hashtag. If you've got something related to interesting text-based art/experiments, patterns, ASCII-art, ANSI-art etc. please share — the more, the merrier...

To start with, here's an experiment from a few years ago to demonstrate some capabilities of thi.ng/text-canvas and thi.ng/shader-ast to create a raymarching renderer outputting images in text mode (with customizable character sets to represent luminance).

Demo:
demo.thi.ng/umbrella/ascii-ray

Commented source code:
github.com/thi-ng/umbrella/blo

Hotkeys:

- c = toggle color on/off
- t = toggle theme switch
- space = toggle update

WebGL version of the same scene (using an almost identical TypeScript shader source, only here transpiled to GLSL and using slightly different colors):
demo.thi.ng/umbrella/shader-as

#TextModeTuesday #ASCIIArt #ThingUmbrella #TypeScript #ShaderAST #Raymarching

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst