MapSCII – A Braille and ASCII world map renderer for the console

[tonisherill]

Anyone else also looking around for more tools like MapSCII, this site frequently updates with other TUI and CLI tools with handy and quick install instructions.

https://terminaltrove.com/

I can also see they have mapscii too which is great.

https://terminaltrove.com/mapscii/

There's also awesome-tuis as well which I also find very useful as well.

https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

[boxed]

Super cool!

I do wish there were much better algorithms for ascii art. The best manual ascii/ansi art humans produced during the peak of that scene is extremely far ahead of any algorithm I've seen.

[tromp]

For example, see Joan Stark's art at https://web.archive.org/web/20091028031410/http://www.geocit...

[rastapasta]

Thanks for the kudos and the shared joy :) AMA, happy to answer any potential questions!

[freedomben]

Thanks for this, this is such a cool tool!

When zooming in, I get "renderer is busy" which hangs the map for a second or two, and I was curious as to why. I'm running it locally so it isn't network bound. CPU does spike (for process "gnome-terminal-server") but doesn't seem to get anywhere near 100% (for any core). Do you know what it's waiting on when it prints "renderer is busy"?

[teruakohatu]

Playing around with that gave me a lot of joy. Would this have worked during the heyday of telnet servers? Or was hardware and connection speeds fast enough to have made this practical?

[ale42]

Bandwidth wouldn't be so much an issue I think (didn't measure though). Wondering more whether the CPU load required to generate the maps in real time would fit on a machine from that epoch.

[lynx23]

BTW braille patterns, I wrote a braille backend for Haskell Diagrams: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/diagrams-braille

Lets you also mix text and braille, although the positioning is a little fragile.

[girishso]

This reminded me of a quine by a member of the Ruby core team - Yusuke Endoh.

Spinning globe in the terminal!

https://gist.github.com/shime/f0ebe84ca42c33b51d42

[NelsonMinar]

I don't know how to read Braille. Does this rendering work at all to someone who knows how to read Braille by touch? Or is it more using the glyphs as a form of visual ASCII-like art?

I took a quick look online and it seems like actual tactile maps are using raised lines for the boundaries and Braille for text labels. e.g. https://www.aph.org/product/world-maps/

[basemi]

> Sorry, you reached a full server, please try again.

Retrying in couple of days, HN will release the hug by then

[tambourine_man]

It's so weird that Hollywood has trained us to think that a TUI is much more hacky/bleeding-edge/pro than a GUI.

Back in the 80/90s the future was 3D GUI, today the future is retro.

All this to say, very cool project.

[adamredwoods]

The fun UIs that come out of Hollywood are also known as "FUI", aka Fantasy (or Fictional) UIs.

https://www.pushing-pixels.org/fui/

Jurassic Park was using IRIX:

https://jurassicsystems.com/

[baudaux]

You can launch telnet in exaequOS.com if you do not have telnet installed. (I am the creator)

Open havoc terminal and type: telnet mapscii.me 23

[ulrischa]

Interesting. But I wonder how one could use this with a Braille line?

[panki27]

> Your connection timed out.

But I get to see the lovely logo!

[aquir]

Awesome! Thanks for spending time on this.

[rOOb85]

I love stuff like this!

[fexed]

This is amazing

[polyterative]

cool