ASCII Saver – Screensaver for terminals

This is my attempt to run some animation while there is no I/O on a terminal. It
runs on FreeBSD and macOS, should also work on Linux. Download it from GitLab.

Build

$ make

Install

$ make install clean

Run

$ $ ascsaver -f /usr/local/share/ascsaver.art/star_wars.vt -b -s 128000 -r 14

And don’t touch the keyboard for a minute to see the Star Wars episode IV running in your terminal!

Options

Usage:
	ascsaver [-b][-i n][-p n][-s n][-f ascii.art][-h]

[-b]		Do not attempt to restore the screen after show
[-i n]		Wait n minutes (default 1) before running a screensaver show
[-p n]		Pause between shows in seconds, default 10
[-r n]		Number of rows in an animation frame, default 24
[-s n]		Animation speed n in microseconds, default 64000
[-f ascii.art]	A file with ASCII art animation
[-h]		This message

Other interesting invocations:

$ ascsaver -f /usr/local/share/ascsaver.art/globe.vt -p 0

Also, if you are an adult, dogs.vt looks very nice:

$ ascsaver -f /usr/local/share/ascsaver.art/dogs.vt -r 1 -p 5 -s 32000

Otherwise, better see the inspiring nasa.vt animation:

$ ascsaver -f /usr/local/share/ascsaver.art/nasa.vt -s 128000

The ascsaver.art directory contains several examples of good old school ASCII-art animation files from the Artscene collection, as well as a dump of Star Wars episode IV telnet session from towel.blinkenlights.nl:23