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Text art tools for people who think Photoshop has too many pixels

July 20, 2026

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  YOUR GPU IS NOW AN EXPENSIVE TYPEWRITER     │
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Modern software companies have spent decades trying to make computers look less like computers.

Smooth icons. Rounded corners. Soft gradients. Friendly animations. Buttons that gently pulse while uploading your private life to seventeen analytics companies.

The Text art tools directory is for people who reject this cowardice.

It contains tools for ASCII art, ANSI graphics, Unicode drawing, PETSCII, teletext, dithering, halftones, bitmap fonts, modular typography and several other visual formats invented when computers had 64 kilobytes of memory and users were still expected to know things.

It is less a software directory than a digital warehouse full of obsolete terminals, blinking cursors and people who can identify a Commodore character set from across a crowded room.

Start here before losing six hours

Moebius

Moebius is one of the strongest general-purpose editors for traditional ANSI and ASCII art. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

This is the tool for creating graphics that look as though they were downloaded from a bulletin board system at 2:14 a.m. while your father screamed that the modem was tying up the telephone line.

It is especially appropriate when your artistic vision includes:

Moebius allows you to make artwork using text characters, block graphics and classic ANSI colors.

In practical terms, it turns a modern computer with billions of transistors into a machine capable of drawing a wizard with punctuation marks.

This is progress.

create.textmode.art

This browser-based editor is a friendly entry point for text-mode artwork and supports multiplayer collaboration.

That means several people can work on the same ASCII image at once, finally answering the question nobody asked:

What if Google Docs were used to draw a cyberpunk frog?

There is no installation process. Open the site, select characters and start building.

Within minutes, you can produce:

This is probably the easiest place to start for anyone who wants to explore text art without first installing a command-line package written by someone named xXByteReaperXx.

RexPaint

RexPaint is a Windows text-mode art editor designed around grid cells, character tiles and color layers.

It is particularly useful for roguelike games, maps, interfaces and sprites.

In a normal graphics program, a character is an image.

In RexPaint, a character is an @ symbol being chased down a hallway by twelve lowercase gs.

This is not a limitation. It is literature.

RexPaint is useful when every cell matters and you need to design:

The grid-based workflow also makes it suitable for embedded displays and other low-resolution projects.

Your ESP32 does not need a 4K cinematic experience. It needs a little face made from brackets that becomes angry when Wi-Fi disconnects.

Durdraw

Durdraw is a terminal-based editor for ASCII, ANSI and Unicode art. It also supports animation.

It runs inside the terminal, which means you can create visual art without leaving the same black rectangle where you update packages, inspect logs and accidentally delete directories.

Durdraw is a strong option for people who consider the mouse a temporary accessibility device.

It can create animated text graphics, which sounds primitive until you remember that most websites now require 14 megabytes of JavaScript to make a hamburger menu slide six pixels to the left.

Durdraw can do more with a terminal than many corporations can do with an engineering department and $40 million in venture capital.

ASCIIFlow

ASCIIFlow is designed for diagrams rather than elaborate artwork.

It is useful for:

Example:

Massive button ESP32 OLED LED matrix Questionable web service Nobody remembers

The project structure, as the post describes it.

ASCII diagrams are easy to paste into Markdown, code comments, README files and bug reports.

They are also permanent.

A diagram made in expensive proprietary software may become unreadable after five years.

An ASCII diagram will remain readable until civilization loses the plus sign.

Unicode: ASCII after obtaining additional funding

Unicode Drawing Club

Unicode Drawing Club is a mobile-friendly editor for constructing images from Unicode characters.

ASCII gives you letters, numbers and punctuation.

Unicode gives you:

Unicode art can be much more detailed than basic ASCII art, although compatibility depends on the font and platform.

You may create a beautiful piece that looks perfect on your phone, only to have someone open it on Windows and see a crime scene involving empty squares.

That is not failure.

That is cross-platform development.

Glyph Drawing Club

Glyph Drawing Club is an experimental design tool built around reusable glyphs and modular vector tiles.

Instead of drawing every shape manually, you construct compositions from repeated components.

It is useful for:

This is where text art stops being a hobby and begins wearing black clothing to gallery openings.

Petmate

Petmate is a PETSCII editor based on the character graphics used by Commodore computers.

PETSCII is a character set containing letters, symbols and geometric forms that can be assembled into surprisingly detailed artwork.

It was developed during an era when computers had almost no memory, so programmers solved the problem by becoming better at everything.

Modern software uses 600 megabytes to display a login screen.

PETSCII can draw a spaceship, a mountain range and a threatening robot using a character set that fits inside a sneeze.

Petmate is useful for creating authentic Commodore-style graphics and animations.

It is also useful for discovering that somebody in 1983 accomplished more with a keyboard than you have accomplished with an Adobe subscription.

Edit.tf

Edit.tf is an editor for teletext graphics.

Teletext uses blocky characters, limited colors and rigid layouts. The result resembles television from a timeline where the internet was invented by a national railway authority.

Everything looks official.

Everything looks urgent.

Everything looks like it is about to announce ferry cancellations.

Teletext is an excellent format for:

Its limitations create a recognizable and highly disciplined visual style.

You cannot hide poor design beneath gradients, shadows and a stock photograph of diverse coworkers pointing at a laptop.

You have six colors and a rectangle.

Defend yourself.

Dithering: making photographs look like evidence

The directory includes many tools for dithering, halftones and low-color image processing.

Dithering simulates shades and colors by arranging available pixels into patterns.

This technique was essential when displays and printers had limited color capabilities.

Today it is used because it looks cool and because artists eventually rediscover every technical restriction that engineers spent decades trying to eliminate.

Dither me this

Dither me this converts images into various dithered styles.

It is useful for:

Dithering can reduce an image to black and white while preserving the illusion of shading.

The computer does this by carefully arranging dots.

Newspapers have used the same basic trick for generations, proving that pixels existed before computers but were unionized.

Dith

Dith is a straightforward browser-based dithering utility.

Upload an image, adjust the options and convert it into something that resembles:

It provides the effect without requiring specialized software or a graduate-level understanding of error diffusion.

Vector Halftone Maker

Vector Halftone Maker converts images into scalable halftone patterns.

Because the output is vector-based, it can be enlarged without becoming blurry.

This is useful for:

Halftone artwork takes a normal photograph and makes it look important enough to be printed on a protest poster.

Tools for people who think diagrams should compile

svgbob editor

Svgbob converts plain-text diagrams into SVG graphics.

You write this:

+---------+     +---------+
| Input   | --> | Process |
+---------+     +----+----+
                    |
                    v
               +---------+
               | Output  |
               +---------+

Svgbob turns it into a polished vector diagram.

This provides the best of both worlds:

Traditional diagramming software turns every revision into furniture rearrangement.

Text-based diagrams let you edit the architecture with a keyboard, where bad architecture belongs.

Lospec

Lospec provides palettes and resources for pixel art.

A restricted color palette forces visual consistency.

Without a palette, beginners frequently choose colors by asking, “What if every highlighter exploded?”

A good palette makes even simple graphics feel deliberate.

A bad palette makes the interface look like a casino ATM during a firmware failure.

Lospec is particularly useful for selecting colors for pixel art, retro games and low-resolution displays.

FontStruct

FontStruct lets users build fonts from modular geometric shapes.

It is useful for:

Font design normally involves years of typographic study.

FontStruct allows you to skip directly to making the letter R look like industrial equipment.

This is democratization.

Why limitations make better art

These tools impose restrictions:

Those restrictions are not weaknesses.

They are the reason the work has personality.

A modern graphics application gives you infinite colors, brushes, effects, layers, filters, masks, gradients and adjustment controls.

This freedom can be useful.

It can also result in spending 45 minutes selecting a shade of gray that nobody will notice.

A text editor gives you 16 colors and 256 characters.

Now you have to make a decision.

Restricted tools force artists to solve visual problems directly. Shapes must be recognizable. Contrast must work. Every character must contribute.

You cannot apply a blur effect and call it atmosphere.

You cannot download a template called Bold Innovative Future Corporate.

You must place the slash yourself.

Text art is still technically useful

ASCII and text-mode graphics are not merely nostalgic.

They can be:

A PNG requires an image decoder.

ASCII requires the continuing existence of the alphabet.

That is a stronger dependency model.

Text art is also exceptionally portable. It can survive operating-system changes, software failures, corporate acquisitions and the collapse of whatever cloud platform currently claims it will exist forever.

A file saved as plain text in 1986 can probably still be opened today.

A presentation created six years ago may already be demanding an account, a subscription and permission to contact your administrator.

The quickest recommendations

Use Moebius for traditional ANSI and ASCII art.

Use create.textmode.art for an accessible browser-based editor.

Use ASCIIFlow for diagrams and documentation.

Use Durdraw for terminal-based art and animation.

Use Glyph Drawing Club for modular experimental design.

Use Petmate when your preferred computing era ended before many current software developers were born.

Use Dither me this when an ordinary photograph looks too much like it was taken during the current century.

The full Text art tools directory contains hundreds of additional projects covering editors, typography, image processing, fonts, teletext, experimental interfaces and digital art formats that resist normal classification.

Some tools are polished.

Some are prototypes.

Some have not been updated in years.

Some open with an interface that immediately makes you question whether the mouse driver has loaded.

That is part of the charm.

This directory documents a long-running human compulsion to take the most advanced machine available and force it to draw a skull using keyboard characters.

          ______
       .-"      "-.
      /            \
     |   X      X   |
     |      __      |
      \    /  \    /
       '-._\__/_.-'
          /||\
         /_||_\

   CREATED ON A COMPUTER
   CAPABLE OF SIMULATING WEATHER

We built machines capable of artificial intelligence, global communication and billions of calculations per second.

Naturally, we are using them to arrange brackets into little men.

The system works.

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