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Comment by bronikowski | Hacker News Reader

Two months ago I hacked something like that for my blog:

    curl https://fuse.pl/beton/10print.html # with code highlighting

    curl https://fuse.pl/beton/cegla.html # just prose

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Looks fantastic! I can't read the post, but I think you can simplify the 10 print Python code to

  while True: print(choice("\\/"), end="")

(the `format` call doesn't seem needed and `choice` works on any iterable, including strings of characters).

Al Sweigart has a repository of "scroll art" similar to 10 print that might interest you: https://github.com/asweigart/scrollart

I wanted to be explicit with my iterables for people who might not know that string is a list of chars. The format() call, I can't tell what I was thinking, probably nothing good.

Thanks!

the code highlighting is really cool, well done! pretty sure it's possible to do something like that with jekyll by updating the `highlight` liquid tag to be able to render ascii highlighting in case of raw pages.

Neat!

Damn that looks really polished.

How does the server know what characters to send so that my specific command line interprets it in a nice way? Sorry if I'm not being very articulate.

EDIT: doesn't work when piping to less.

I'd be honest, my approach is "everything is utf-8, right? And every terminal has at least 16 colors at the ready?". It does not degrade gracefully, I checked. It's more of a party trick than something reasonable, but nothing stops you from doing it correctly, it would just be a hassle to serve in a static way (every variation would require a different txt file to be generated and sent).

> EDIT: doesn't work when piping to less.

try -R

> try -R

works :-)

I'm guessing you're on BSD (or maybe Apple)? Their version requires you to tell less there's a raw data at the input.

No, Debian 11. Fresh install too.

Very strange, I could have sworn I've tested in without -R with Debian 11 (I can't check, that laptop broke and my other machines are still at 10). Maybe it's terminal definition or something changed.

Terminal emulation is a spooking place full of ancient magic. One of the reasons why I assumed "modern defaults". It would turn "a weekend hack" into a session of misery. ;)

> EDIT: doesn't work when piping to less.

What if you pass '-r' to less? (I can't verify myself because it worked without -r for me)

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