Introduction

asciicn is an ASCII engine plus a catalogue of components for React and shadcn/ui. Photos, video, animated backgrounds, display type and terminal-style UI, all drawn in characters and coloured by your theme.

How it works

• The engine installs into lib/ascii as plain source. It samples an input onto a character grid, shapes and dithers the tones, then paints glyphs to a canvas from a pre-rendered atlas.
• Three inputs cover everything: a source (image, video, canvas), a field (a function of x, y and time) or a frame (write the whole grid yourself).
• Components are thin wrappers you install one by one with the shadcn CLI. They're yours to edit.
• Theming is just CSS color. Put text-primary on any component.
• Export any canvas to plain text, SVG or PNG through its ref.

With an agent

The asciicn-skill item adds a SKILL.md for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and friends. Ask for “an ASCII starfield behind the hero” and the agent writes a field on the engine, styled with your tokens.

Next: Installation, or try the Studio to convert your own images.