[Justine Tunney]’s printimage.com is a program capable of splatting full-color images to text mode terminal sessions, but that’s not even its neatest trick. It’s also a small binary executable capable of running on six different operating systems: Linux, Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. All without having to be installed or otherwise compiled first. On top of it all, it’s less than 100 kb.
How is this possible? It’s thanks to [Justine]’s αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε format, implemented by a project called Cosmopolitan which aims to turn C into a build-once-run-anywhere language. The printimage.com source code is included within the Cosmopolitan project.
If the name sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because the Cosmopolitan project is a key piece of a tool we recently covered: llamafile, which allows people to package up an LLM (large language model) as a single-file, multi-OS executable.
As printimage.com shows, terminal windows are capable of more than just text. Still, plain ASCII has its appeal. Check out the ASCII art STL file viewer which might just make your next sick ASCII art banner a bit easier to generate.
Justine’s regular pace of amazing projects (you didn’t even mention sectorlisp or blinkenlights, among many others) is an inspiration (once I get over the intimidation). Thanks for letting us know about this, and thanks to @jart for everything!
Oh, my brain hurts.
The guy that made this is a freaking genius. I’m thoroughly impressed
Microsoft Defender is convinced that the executable contains something unpleasant.
Is anyone else having problems downloading and running it?
Problem reported is
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclopedia-description?name=Trojan%3AWin32%2FWacatac.H!ml&threatid=2147814523
That’s normal. Defender distrusts pretty much all standalone software. I would be surprised if it didn’t throw a fit.
Why not sixels? Terminal image viewer: https://github.com/hackerb9/vv
They need to make it for ansi art as well