
Show HN: Vixl44 – Create pixel art inside your terminal using vim movements - sebashwa
https://github.com/sebashwa/vixl44/
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v-yadli
Brainstorm: what if we really make a vim plugin for pixel art?

I see this to be hugely practical. It will enable rapid charting in source
code documentation, and also, solve the table formatting problem once and for
all.

Edit: shapes? Patterns? Gradients? Dithering? (Think about cacao) lasso tool?
Semantic movement? Like, w moves over all reddish blocks

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sebashwa
Wow, I never of this being practical in vim. That's an awesome idea! Although
I'm not sure it would be 'high res' enough to work for inline code
documentation.. If that is what you meant?

Also I love the idea of semantic movement, I'll definitely put it on my
feature-list!

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v-yadli
Yes, for example if we can do tables with color-background text, it would save
columns to draw the column boarders. :)

Even if we go with monochrome charts, it will be super useful for describing
data structures and visualizing algorithms.

Also, looking forward to the semantic movement implementation!

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skocznymroczny
Next up: tell inexperienced people to try to exit Vim and use it as entropy
source for random number generation

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twoquestions
This looks pretty cool! Pens/mice are great for analog style art (digital
painting and the like), but for highly discrete art like pixel art a keyboard
looks to be a much better interface at first blush.

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flanbiscuit
Nice. Reminds of the ANSI Art I would see on a BBS back in the day. Is there a
way to export the art so that it could be printed in the Terminal. Would love
to add some art to some scripts

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fenwick67
I have worked on libraries for images in terminals
[[https://github.com/fenwick67/term-px](https://github.com/fenwick67/term-px)]
but I never thought to make a simple image import / export tool so you could
just `cat` the file to show it in a terminal. Now you gave me a weekend
project.

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fenwick67
For those playing at home, I just made this work:

[https://codepen.io/fenwick/full/oGVQNX/](https://codepen.io/fenwick/full/oGVQNX/)

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laumars
It might be worth using the none standard but we'll supported true colour ANSI
escape sequences. You'll get much better output that way (I've done lots of
experimenting with images in the terminal and I found that gave me the best
output and more reliably then the other ANSI hacks that are limited to only
supporting one specific terminal emulator)

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ramses0
It would be great to have some buttons in C-v mode to "y, p, x" ... and maybe
you could (ab)-use %/* while in visual mode to allow rotation or flipping?

Love it!

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sebashwa
Thanks for your comment! Yanking is one of the features I want to implement
next! Something I already missed when drawing the first pictures or so!

Cool idea to use %/* (or similar) to rotate/flip stuff! I only thought about
replacing a certain color with another using %s/

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ramses0
Also if you every played "adom" using "w<motion.hjkl>" could "word-ish" to the
next color in that direction. I don't know how much you're still messing with
it, but it's a fun problem to think about... transferring useful Vi motions
and commands into a new problem domain.

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kmnt
I think gvim already supports colour rendering of x pixmaps which double as C
source code.

