Alex Lakatos 🥑

Posted on Sep 29, 2019

ascii-themes - Node.js CLI Interface to Generate VSCode Themed ASCII Art

#showdev #node #javascript #cli

I've built a Node.js CLI interface this weekend to generate themed ASCII art. It supports 287 fonts from Figlet and 18 themes from VS Code.

This all started because of a tweet Wassim did, and I tried to replicate that. I've managed to do a passable version using online tools but it was a manual process. So I tried recreating it in Node.js using Figlet, and the Monokai Dimmed theme from VS Code. I should have stopped here, it was good enough.

But I went too deep down the rabbit hole, so I built a customizable CLI with more than 5000 options to generate ASCII art in the terminal. Enjoy! And do comment below with whatever cool thing you end up generating with it.

Usage

npx ascii-themes generate dev.to

Optional flags:
- --font The Figlet Font to use. Defaults to 'Slant Relief'.
- --themeName The VS Code theme to use. Defaults to 'Monokai Dimmed'.
- --horizontalLayout The horizontal layout to use for the Figlet Font. Defaults to 'default'.
- --verticalLayout The vertical layout to use for the Figlet Font. Defaults to 'default'.

Interactive Mode

The CLI has 2 interactive modes:

npx ascii-themes -i

Will allow you to select from the available commands (generate, support, interactive) and input the flags for them via text prompts.

npx ascii-themes interactive

Will allow you to input the text and select from a list of the available fonts, themes, and layouts.

Options

To see supported fonts and themes run npx ascii-themes support.

Or you can watch this video tweet I did while building the CLI, it shows you all available fonts in one minute.

Alex Lakatos 🥑🇮🇩 @jsdayid

@lakatos88

Does the world need another ASCII Art CLI?

16:01 PM - 28 Sep 2019

Top comments (8)

Ibrahim Cesar • Sep 29 '19 • Edited

I tried your example and I get this error:

Invalid regular expression flags

Alex Lakatos 🥑 • Sep 29 '19

What command did you run?

Ibrahim Cesar • Sep 29 '19

npx ascii-themes generate dev.to

Alex Lakatos 🥑 • Sep 30 '19

what's your OS and terminal app? you might have to escape that string.

npx ascii-themes generate 'dev.to'

Ibrahim Cesar • Sep 30 '19

I'm a Mac OS with Oh My Zsh in the iTerm2:

 ibrahim.souza@Pudim  ~  npx ascii-themes generate 'dev.to'
npx: instalou 46 em 4.971s
Invalid regular expression flags
 ✘ ibrahim.souza@Pudim  ~  npx ascii-themes generate "dev.to"
npx: instalou 46 em 2.524s
Invalid regular expression flags

Alex Lakatos 🥑 • Sep 30 '19 • Edited

That is totally weird, the CLI doesn't throw that message, it's from somewhere deeper in the dependencies. I can't reproduce it, can you help me debug it please? Maybe even throw in a PR at github.com/AlexLakatos/ascii-themes

I'm guessing it tries to interpret the . in dev.to as regex. What happens if you try some text without the dot, like npx ascii-themes generate "devto"