webdevamey/imageinterminal-js

Image in Terminal.js is a command line tool that converts an ordinary image file into art you can view directly inside a terminal window, using text characters and terminal colors instead of a graphical viewer. It reads a photo or picture, analyzes the brightness and color of each pixel, and reconstructs the image as colored text. The project offers three different ways to render an image, each as its own script. The first, considered the recommended default, maps pixel brightness to a gradient of ASCII characters and colors each character to match the original pixel, giving a good balance of detail and color accuracy. The second uses Unicode braille patterns instead of letters, which packs more pixels into each character for finer detail, though this method only supports black and white output. The third uses half block characters with separate foreground and background colors, letting each character represent two stacked pixels, which works well for smooth color gradients. Using the tool involves running one of the three scripts from the command line with Node.js, passing the path to an image file and an optional width flag to control how many characters wide the output should be, which lets you match it to your terminal's size. Under the hood it relies on a single dependency, a JavaScript image library called Jimp, for loading formats like PNG, JPEG, BMP, and GIF and resizing them while keeping their proportions. Getting accurate colors requires a terminal that supports 24 bit ANSI colors, such as iTerm2, Kitty, Alacritty, Windows Terminal, or the VS Code integrated terminal. The README notes common issues, like missing colors on unsupported terminals or stretched output that can be fixed by adjusting the width setting. The character gradient and default width used by the ASCII renderer can also be edited directly in the script for anyone who wants a different look.