px2ansi

A high-performance Rust port of px2ansi.

px2ansi converts pixel art images into ANSI escape codes for display in modern terminals. It uses 24-bit truecolor and unicode half-block characters (▀ / ▄) to render images with precision.

It is significantly faster than the original Python implementation and ships as a single, static binary.

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Features

• 🚀 Fast: Written in Rust, optimized for speed (~25x faster than Python).

• 🎨 Truecolor: Supports full 24-bit RGB colors.

• 📐 Smart Resizing: Automatically detects terminal width and resizes large images to fit.

• 🖼️ Flexible Filtering: Choose between sharp pixel art (nearest) or smooth high-res downscaling (lanczos3).

• 🧩 Transparency: Correctly handles alpha channels (rendering transparent pixels as terminal background).

• 📦 Simple: Single binary, no dependencies required at runtime.

Installation

From Source

git clone https://github.com/saylesss88/px2ansi-rs
cd px2ansi-rs
cargo install --path .

crates.io

cargo install px2ansi-rs

Usage

Basic

Convert an image and print to stdout (auto-resizes to fit your terminal):

px2ansi-rs image.png

Advanced Options

Resize filters:

Use --filter to control how the image is downscaled.

• Pixel Art (Pikachu, sprites): Use nearest to keep sharp edges.

px2ansi-rs sprite.png --filter nearest

• Photos / Logos: Default (Lanczos3) works best.

px2ansi-rs photo.jpg

Manual Sizing(WIP):

px2ansi-rs huge_screenshot.png --width 100
px2ansi-rs pikachu.png --filter=nearest --width 50

Save output to a file:

px2ansi-rs image.png -o art.txt

Try it out!

You can test it right now with the included test.png (a small pixel art example if you cloned the repo):

px2ansi-rs tests/test.png