asciiworld – world map depicted in ASCII

Last Updated on August 11, 2021

One of the great strengths of Linux is the whole raft of weird and wonderful open source utilities. That strength does not simply derive from the functionality they offer, but from the synergy generated by using them together, sometimes in conjunction with applications.

The UNIX philosophy spawned a “software tools” movement which focused on developing concise, basic, clear, modular and extensible code that can be used for other projects. This philosophy remains an important element for many Linux projects.

Good open source developers writing utilities seek to make sure the utility does its job as well as possible, and work well with other utilities. The goal is that users have a handful of tools, each of which seeks to excel at one thing. Some utilities work well on their own.

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures put together from characters defined by the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard. These characters are letters, numbers and special characters such as # / and \. ASCII art is as much a constituent element of the internet as emoticons, cats, or acronyms such as ROTFL and LOL.

This article looks at asciiworld, a simple program that renders a world map in ASCII. The program is written in C.

Compiling

We can clone the project’s repository with the command:

$ git clone https://www.uninformativ.de/git/asciiworld.git

Change into the source code’s directory:

$ cd asciiworld

Compile the program with the command:

$ make

You may find a package in your distro’s repositories. For example, there’s a package in the Arch User Repository (for Arch and Arch-based distros).

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary