🖼️ ansi stdio

Terminal text composition and animation library.

$ uvx ansi_stdio

Tools

ansi-quantize - terminal filter to help you strip out log dump noise from asciinema recordings. Currently doesn’t do a very good job of it, due to not having char-level diffs.
ansi-fonts - lists available monospace fonts on the system.

Design

The thing is a scene graph made of Actor nodes. Each node has a clock and when rendered, can redirect calls. Haven’t decided how child relationships and recursion will work yet, so keeping this open. Probably won’t call them actors either.

Clocks are chained timers that can be paused and implement time however they like. clock.wall gives you the system time. Clock.time gives the current time etc.

Buffers are sparse grids of rich characters. They track their own size and can be merged (+= and +), queried/set (slice notation) and copied.

Object design

So far we have:

🔢 Versioned - objects that are versioned have a version number that gets updated when they are changed.
📦 Box - a 2d box, used for bounding things.
⏲️ Clock - the workhorse of animation.

Still not figured out:

💾 Saved - a serializable class.
🎞️ The main actor class - is it a View?
How buffers, views and time work together with caching.
Should “Animation” be a buffer?

Overall plan

Build a custom video format with keyframes and delta frames/buffers. This can act as a cache and a rendering format. The encoder can then be used to capture terminal graphics from various sources, including text files, programs or other loaders.
Build serialization into the core objects via a generic mixin. The construction parameters will be attribute names by convention, so they can always be (de)serialized.
Once the foundations are laid, build in structure for working with a vast library of effects, sources and so on, and filtering it effectively. So we don’t end up constrained, with everything dumped in a directory, and can compose the different things in various ways.
Make a plugin system for all these things.
Build a basic UI that works with this, somewhere between Kdenlive and OBS Studio.
Go to town building components that are useful. Idea being to use code generation within the confines of a decent structure, so using AI to add to it doesn’t end up like a Glastonbury Festival toilet.

Next Steps