So I recently realized that the Fall Creators update of Windows 10 adds support for 24-bit color in the console via ansi codes. Many Linux and Mac terminals already support 256 and 24-bit color.
Upon discovering this I started looking around for a high-color ansi art editor. The only serious one I came up with was Rexpaint. After a few hours of hacking around the .rex file format, I can now export .rex files to .ans and display them in the Windows command prompt in full colour:
I'm hoping to release the program as open source soon.
Speaking of which, it would make me really happy to do some hacking on Rexpaint itself. If it was open source, I would probably take a shot at porting it to Linux and adding support for native file dialogs via
https://github.com/mlabbe/nativefiledialog.
Thanks for Rexpaint!