MapSCII – A Braille and ASCII world map renderer for the console | Hacker News Reader

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

github.com

147 pointsitherseed23 comments

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

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.

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

https://16colo.rs/pack/mist1022/ATONALOSPREY-RAVEN_AND_SKULL... for a more extreme example

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

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"?

Even though it runs locally, it is network-connected to the tile server that provides you with the vector tiles (unless they are cached locally after their first use). You currently have to wait for the requested tile(s) to be downloaded, processed, and available in memory before continuing rendering (which is slow in direct comparison to rendering itself). Could be improved by continuing to render the zoomed features of the parent tile until its children are ready (triggering a re-render) - but for now, it simply lets you wait until then :)

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?

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.

Based on cleaning up the asciinema recording it looks to be somewhere around 400-500 kbps averaged over the demo.

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.

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

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/

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

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

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.

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/

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

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

> Your connection timed out.

But I get to see the lovely logo!

Awesome! Thanks for spending time on this.

I love stuff like this!

This is amazing

cool

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