Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sludge]

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!

[Kyzrati]

Cool! I'll add a link on the resources page if you do end up putting it out there and drop a mention here to let me know.

So this .ans format can technically support additional colors on these systems, eh? (and arbitrary dimensions!) Note that RP already does .ans exporting, although it uses the traditional more limited format. (And the separate version of RP pre-configured for .ans editing also uses narrower text fonts by default, which are more likely to match the target ratio.)

I don't have any plans to open source REXPaint, but more versions and features will be released down the line.

[Sludge]

Yep, I put it up.  Check the releases tab for executables since no one wants to download a Go toolchain just to try this.

https://github.com/mlabbe/rex2ansi

Yeah, I didn't use the existing ANSI export pipeline at all.  I just read the .fx file and exported ANSI codes.  I also generated UTF-8 ansi files since DOS Codepage 437 is rarer and rarer out there these days if you're not depending on a bespoke game engine.

[Kyzrati]

Excellent, added!

Several years back when I added .ans exporting the request came from the ANSI art crowd which uses the traditional format, but now that this is apparently a thing on Windows I should add this feature to REXPaint as well, eventually. It's also nice to not require a special editing mode and still have some level of .ans compliance!

[Laida]

Yep, seems very cool and merry 

[Sludge]

There are probably still benefits to having the traditional ANSI color support rather than full-on RGB.  Not all terminals support the higher colour ranges.

That said, I would probably let other programs that specialize in the traditional colorsets focus on that.

[Kyzrati]

True I wouldn't want to drop support for the traditional color restrictions, but the funny thing is the other programs made for it in the first place actually aren't very good, there are simply lots of people who use them just because they have been for years and got used to them . More of the modern/beginner ANSI artists have been picking up RP instead.