Coding for fun and Image-Term256Color
December 30th 2011Following my last couple of posts on making your terminal beautiful , today I thought I would write about something I made recently. I didn't do it for any real need or utility. I didn't make it for any real recognition ( although, it is the first real project I put on CPAN, and the studious reader may note that this entire post could be construed as shameless self promotion ).
Coding For Fun
I wrote Image-Term256Color for fun.
I was using my terminal one day ( er, every day ) and thought that having the ability to view images, even in a rudimentary fashion would be a neat thing to have. Being a fan pixel art, ASCII art, ANSI art and other 'low-tech' stuff, I thought viewing strictly visual materials in certain terminal contexts could be amusing in the least and possibly enlightening at the best.
So I did it.
It didn't happen quickly, but the whole process, including the research involved was exciting. It was fun. It was something I had never really seen before. I think it's important to embark on some of these more 'pointless' projects as they don't just provide an immense amount of stimulation, but they serve to remind that not everything needs to be so serious.
Keep it Going
So... I did what any sane person would do and ran with it. I started on Git-Glog almost immediately after pushing out the initial version of Image-Term256Color.
Again, there isn't any real utility there. It's just a fancy git-log with mangled Gravatars in line with the respective commits on the terminal:
It sure was fun to write though.
Update
March 8 2012
If you're interested in this problem or other ways to see images in your terminal check out libcaca and cacaview. This is an awesome C lib and set of tools for viewing images in your terminal.
Note: libcaca requires imlib2 to be installed to support most image formats.