ANSI art in your terminal, the way ACiDDraw did it, rebuilt for today.
Mouse-first. Every classic scene format. TheDraw fonts. Layers, frames, replay.
Draw with a friend over the internet, or with Claude.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jondot/acidtrip/main/install.sh | sh
acidtrip              # a new canvas
acidtrip logo.ans     # open (or create) a file

macOS and Linux, x86_64 and arm64. Any terminal with truecolor and a mouse works: iTerm2, kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, Alacritty. To build from source instead, run cargo install --git https://github.com/jondot/acidtrip acidtrip.

Paint with the mouse and watch the art come out in real CP437 glyphs. The smart pen traces your stroke at the font's own 8×16 pixels and picks the block, shade or box line that fits each cell. Brushes turn it into a paint program: brush pen, calligraphy, airbrush, chalk and spray, each tunable in the brush studio.

Smooth strokes, picked glyph by glyph	The brush studio: tip, ink, hand, glyphs
Gradients shaded ░▒▓ the way scene artists did it	Seamless patterns: bricks, weaves, grids, your own
43 photo filters, from Vivid to Ludwig	Recolor: swap one color everywhere
The ACiDDraw block menu: move, flip, rotate, justify	Layers, with lock and tracing references

Keys are what ACiDDraw players expect: the arrows move and 1–0 type the tile set. Or switch the keyboard to the Art tool and it becomes a glyph board, with W for ▀, S for █ and X for ▄. Everything is also a click away in the sidebar, and Ctrl-K searches every command.

About 3,700 TheDraw fonts are one command away (acidtrip fonts get), with the FIGlet set built in. Pull in any image, and every cell tries every block glyph to find the best shape and two colors.

Pick a TheDraw font, see it live

Image import with presets: photo, scene, pixel art, cel, comic

Pieces can have frames, with onion skin and timing, and export to an animated GIF or a classic cat-able ansimation. Every edit is recorded too, so replay plays a piece back being drawn, speed-paint style, and saves it as a GIF or an asciinema cast.

Draw together: share a ticket, everyone draws on one canvas. Peer to peer, no accounts, no servers to run.

Claude as a partner: ask for a logo or a fire gradient, and it draws on its own layer with the real tools.

Claude Code can draw straight into your open editor, live and undoable, with no API key needed in acidtrip:

claude mcp add acidtrip -- acidtrip mcp

Browse decades of scene art on 16colo.rs like a streaming service, view any piece full screen with its credits, and open it as a fresh document to remix. The sourcing studio cuts letters from classic logos into fonts in the artist's style, with the artist credited.

Rows of groups, packs and years

Cut letters from a logo into a font

It loads and saves ANSI (iCE and 24-bit), BIN, XBin, ADF, IDF, TND, PCBoard, Avatar and ASCII. It exports to pixel-exact PNG and SVG, GIFs (including the BBS modem reveal), HTML, a React component, C/Pascal/ASM arrays, mIRC and asciinema. Set up the files once in the export panel, Figma style, and write them all with one click.

Export rows: every size and format, one click

Versions, autosave and crash recovery

acidtrip convert art.ans art.svg --pixel-exact
acidtrip convert art.ans art.gif --gif reveal --baud 9600
acidtrip replay art.acid art.gif

Made with acidtrip

A set of Omarchy wallpapers and tee logos, drawn in acidtrip. The sources (.acid, .ans) and PNGs at desktop sizes are in examples/.

Learn more

The full manual is at acidtrip.vercel.app. It covers drawing, brushes, the Art tool, fonts and stencils, animation, replay, drawing together, AI, formats, the CLI, and keymaps and config. Inside the app, ? shows the live key sheet.

Development

cargo test --workspace     # unit tests, plus end-to-end runs of the real app

acidtrip-harness drives the real binary in a pseudo-terminal with keys and the mouse, and screenshots it. Every screenshot above was taken that way. The scenarios in tests/e2e/ and the user flows in tests/flows/ run as part of cargo test.

Crate	Contents
acidtrip-core	model, transactions, tools, rendering
acidtrip-io	formats, fonts, stencils, versions
acidtrip-ai	tool schema, MCP, agent, harvester
acidtrip-net	draw together: peer-to-peer sessions over iroh
acidtrip-harness	the headless pty test and screenshot harness
acidtrip	the TUI

The website lives in website/ (see website/README.md). Releases are one command: see RELEASING.md.

Credits

• ACiD Productions, for ACiDDraw.
• ansidraw (MIT), whose MCP and half-block ideas shaped this project.
• icy_tools (MIT/Apache), for the ANSI parser, retrofont and icy_sauce.
• The VGA font is from libansilove (BSD-2).
• The FIGlet fonts are BSD-3.
• GNU Unifont, for the Unicode fallback.

Licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0.