Hacker News Reader

Comment by carra | Hacker News Reader

It's weird to see this called "ANSI art". Is that an American thing? I don't think I've ever heard that in Europe, everybody calls it ASCII art.

View on HN

American here, but I've always known these to be distinctly different. ANSI art uses the full 256 character set (and mostly the extended, block-like characters), and 16 colors, whereas ascii art doesn't have the extended characters and colors. There was a thriving ANSI art scene in the 90s in the era of BBSs.

If you have not seen it, the definitive ansi (and ascii) art archive, 16colors, is great https://16colo.rs/

Or try your hand with this online ansi art editor https://ansidraw.com/

That was my initial thought too on seeing the title, having never heard the term before. So I decided to look it up and it turns out there is a whole separate genre called “ANSI art” based on a different tech stack and a naming mistake from history:

- ASCII is a real ANSI standard, the 7-bit character set that we all know and love

- Microsoft, IBM and others extended this to many different 8-bit sets, each with its own “extended” characters in the 128-255 range, often including both graphic symbols and control codes

- one of the more popular ones, windows-1252, became informally known as ANSI because Microsoft hoped that this (and others) would become new ANSI standards (they didn’t)

- people on BBSes and then early websites used this encoding standard to create art using graphic symbols and colour codes that are not available in ASCII art

- due to the optimistic, but ultimately incorrect, naming of both charset and the supporting library, this became known as ANSI art

These are definitely ANSI art. They use the unique PC extended character set (pipes, shaded blocks, etc), the classic PC CGA/EGA 16-color palette, and ANSI escape codes.

I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.

I got into the distinction a little bit in Part 2 of this series: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco...

It’s a technicality - they call it ASCII art in the US even though it includes both non-ASCII characters (IBM extensions) and ANSI.SY’s escape sequences to change colors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art

"ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists."

European here. Since 90s, ANSI art were always a thing. Maybe the question isn't if its "an American thing", maybe the question is if you are so well informed as you think?

Indeed it seems I was not well informed. Back in the 90s I did see several pieces of ANSI art, but even then the people and magazines I knew always called all of it ASCII art. In fact I don't think I had heard the term ANSI art before today.

I guess this may similar to how we usually call all tracker music "MODs", though in fact there are MOD, XM, S3M, IT...

ASCII art was for, me, what they used in Phrack and other zines, and ANSI was this blocky colorful, used in many warez and bbs.. like the telecomics..

im not the best person to respond to this, but to my knowledge, ansi was basically just ascii art but with the ability to color stuff, and with extra characters like blocks, accents, etc. it was mainly used to make art on bbs boards, at least from what i have seen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com