Cadubi
Version: Web: https://github.com/statico/cadubi
Cadubi stands for Creative ASCII Drawing Utility. It’s written in Perl and is, if you haven’t figured this out, designed for drawing text-based images that are viewable on a typical Unix-based consoles. Usually the applications that emulate these consoles support various text modes, such as background and foreground colours, bold and inverse.
This text art, which is commonly called ASCII art, is used primarily for fun or showcasing your turbo-charged shell prompt to friends. In the past, it was commonly used in online bulletin boards (BBSes) and text-based email applications etc. In fact, if you liked the EscapetheGUI feature [see p52 LXF197], Cadubi would be a perfect companion to the selection of applications that we mentioned.
While there are some utilities that are able to transform bitmaps into ASCII art, Cadubi significantly simplifies the process. Once you run $ cadubi , you’ll see a blank field and a cursor. We’d suggest the next step should be to hit Ctrl+h and examine the very handy Cadubi keys legend. It describes the simple drawing tool, which can paint on the background and on the front.
Cadubi uses a pen, which describes the mode you’re using. Its properties are the painting character, foreground colour, background colour, bold, inverse, and blink. To select the background colour, you need to press b and then enter the code of 0-8, according to the legend. The front colour can be selected using the f key and the symbol it paints is changed after pressing p. There are also a few more options, such as toggle pen bold (g), or toggle text mode (t), which are easy to remember.
In our experience, you’ll find yourself hitting arrow keys and the space key to experiment with amateur ASCII art in minutes, and the whole experience can feel very zen.
Cadubi also enables you to save results in a plain text file (Ctrl+o), which will be correctly displayed either by Cadubi itself or many of Unix shell commands, like cat .
“Experiment with amateur ASCII art in minutes.”