rustisay

Turn images and GIF/APNG/WebP animations into colored ASCII art — in your terminal or right in the browser.

Install

cargo install rustisay

that's it.

Usage

rustisay image.gif                # colored ASCII art, animates in the terminal
rustisay photo.jpg                # static images work too
rustisay image.gif --no-color     # turn color off → clean b&w
rustisay image.gif -a letters     # pick a character set
rustisay anim.gif -o out.gif      # save a real animated GIF

-o out.gif encodes the art back into pixels with the font glyphs and writes a proper animated GIF, preserving the source frame delays. No palette drift between frames — one global color palette for the whole animation.

Options

Flag	Short	Description	Default
<image_path>	—	Image, GIF, APNG, or animated WebP	(required)
--alphabet	-a	Character set to use	alphabet
--width	-w	Output width in characters	auto
--no-color	-n	Disable color (b&w output)	false
--output	-o	Write to a file; .gif extension → real animated GIF	—
--gif	—	Force GIF output regardless of the file extension	false
--repeat	—	Loop count, 0 = forever	0
--bg-color	—	GIF background (#RRGGBB, #RGB, black, white)	black
--invert	—	Invert luminance (photo negative)	false
--brightness	—	Brightness in -1.0..1.0	0.0
--contrast	—	Contrast multiplier	1.0
--fps	—	Playback fps (animated files only)	30.0

Alphabets

Pick your text style with -a:

File	Characters
block.txt	Solid block █ — best for colored output
alphabet.txt	Full printable set (!"#$...xyz{~})
fast.txt	Single # character
letters.txt	Upper and lowercase letters
lowercase.txt	a-z
uppercase.txt	A-Z
minimal.txt	/\!.*^_
symbols.txt	Punctuation and symbols

The web version

The exact same engine, compiled to WebAssembly with wasm-pack. Live demo — no install, drag & drop, sliders, terminal-style playback, GIF/TXT downloads:

https://himanshu121865.github.io/rustisay/

The web/pkg/ output is also a publishable npm package:

cd web/pkg
npm publish

License

MIT