DotDotDot

Overview

DotDotDot is a performant library that uses braille characters to draw to the terminal in a user-defined grid. It is not limited to rendering a single image, but also allows for smooth animations. DotDotDot is developed for linux, but should also work on MacOSX (not tested). Windows is not supported.

Important: Make sure your terminal uses a font that supports braille unicode characters, otherwise the output will look messed up!

Features

Rendering engine for animations
Efficient (Minimal memory footprint, caching ...)
Intuitive API to modify the grid
- Draw individual dots/pixels
- Draw basic geometic shapes (triangle, lines ...)
- Draw borders around the grid

Usage & examples

The repository includes some examples what the library can do. They can be found under examples/examples.c. Shown below is the example to track an animated sine curve:

void example_sine_tracking()
{
    int width = 124;
    int height = 40;

    grid *g = grid_new(width, height);
    renderer_new(g);

    double shift = 0;

    while (1)
    {
        grid_clear(g);

        // Draw line
        grid_draw_line(g, 0, height / 2, width - 1, (height + sin(shift) * height) / 2);

        // Draw curve
        for (int j = 0; j < width; j++)
        {
            grid_set_pixel(g, j, (height / 2 * sin(0.05 * j + shift) + height / 2));
        }

        // Move curve
        shift += 0.05;

        renderer_update(g);
    }

    // Free allocations
    renderer_free();
    grid_free(g);
}

Dependencies

libm for mathematical functions
ncurses needed by the renderer
pbm for the pbmtodots tool

Roadmap

Improve rendering performance
Add additional shapes/structures to the API
Framepacing measurement/correction for animations
A statusbar that can display additional information such as frames per second etc.
Unit tests

Authorship

766F6964 on Github wrote most of the code
Eli the Bearded added pbmtodots

References

The project was heavily inspired by the popular .

Eli-the-Bearded/DotDotDot