asciime

ASCIIme

Turn your terminal into a kawaii anime experience! ASCIIme is a command-line tool that displays animated ASCII art GIFs in your terminal, with a focus on anime and kawaii content.

Features

• Display animated GIFs as ASCII art in your terminal
• Support for true color and 256-color terminals
• Automatic caching system for faster loading
• Configurable display settings
• Category-based GIF selection
• Background prefetching for smooth playback

Installation

First install my fork of the gif-cli-fast project using:

python -m pip install git+https://github.com/Felixdiamond/gif-cli-fast

Then set up asciime:

# Install from PyPI
pip install asciime

# Or install from source
git clone https://github.com/Felixdiamond/asciime.git
cd asciime
pip install -e .

Usage

Basic usage:

# Display a random GIF
asciime --random

# Normal mode with prefetching and caching
asciime

Note: I'm using the Free Plan on render so my API usually sleeps in 5 mins or so. If you want 100% uptime, you can set up your own server by cloning the repo asciime-api

If you want to see a random anime gif whenever you open your terminal:

For Bash users

Add this to your ~/.bashrc:

# Display random ASCII anime GIF on terminal start
asciime

For Zsh users

Add this to your ~/.zshrc:

# Display random ASCII anime GIF on terminal start
asciime

For Fish users

Add this to your ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

# Display random ASCII anime GIF on terminal start
asciime

Not sure if this works for windows yet..

Configuration

ASCIIme can be configured by editing ~/.config/asciime/config.json. Available options:

{
    "display_mode": "truecolor",     // Display mode: "truecolor", "256", "256fgbg", or "nocolor"
    "max_cache_size_mb": 100,        // Maximum cache size in megabytes
    "max_cache_age_days": 30,        // Maximum age of cached files in days
    "prefetch_count": 3,             // Number of GIFs to prefetch
    "api_url": "https://asciime-api.onrender.com/api",  // API endpoint
    "preferred_category": null,       // Preferred GIF category (null for random)
    "loop_count": 3,                 // Number of times to loop animation (0 for infinite)
    "debug": false                   // Enable debug logging
}

Requirements

• Python 3.8 or higher
• Internet connection for fetching GIFs

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

Acknowledgments

• Uses gif-cli-fast for GIF to ASCII conversion