ASCII

asciinema – record and share your terminal sessions, the right way

asciinema is a tool to record terminal sessions and share them as videos. But unlike many other tools that provide this functionality, ascinema does a very smart thing – instead of encoding the session into a video it interactively replays it in a text mode, which allows one to select and copy-paste commands and outputs from the playback. The resulting “video” is also much lighter and faster than it would be if encoded into a video stream.

This is great for demos, tutorials, and other more technical scenarios. The website also has a collection of recent and featured public screencasts.

ASCII vs. ANSI

Browserling does it again:

For those of you not old enough, here are the ASCII and ANSI Wikipedia pages. Back in a day we used these for cool art, fancy user interfaces, email signatures, games and more. Have a look at some cool examples of ASCII art. Now imagine those “images” colored with the breathtaking variety of 8 colors and you’ve got yourself a true 90’s rainbow explosion.

You’d probably be surprised to learn that a lot of these have survived to modern day, and are still used in command line user interfaces.

P.S.: And if you think that this stuff is ancient, have a look at typewriter art example.