MapSCII - The Whole World In Your Console.

A node.js based Vector Tile to Braille and ASCII renderer for xterm-compatible terminals.

Try it out!

$ telnet mapscii.me

If you're on Windows, use the open source telnet client PuTTY to connect.

Features

Use your mouse to drag and zoom in and out!
Discover Point-of-Interests around any given location
Highly customizable layer styling with Mapbox Styles support
Connect to any public or private vector tile server
Or just use the supplied and optimized OSM2VectorTiles based one
Work offline and discover local VectorTile/MBTiles
Compatible with most Linux and OSX terminals
Highly optimizied algorithms for a smooth experience
100% pure Coffee-/JavaScript! 😎

How to install it locally

If you haven't already got Node.js >= version 4.5, then go get it.

npm install -g mapscii

If you're on OSX, or get an error about file permissions, you may need to do sudo npm install -g mapscii

Running

This is pretty simple too.

mapscii

Keyboard shortcuts

Arrows up, down, left, right to scroll around
Press a or z to zoom in and out
Press q to quit

Mouse control

If your terminal supports mouse events you can drag the map and use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

Behind the scenes

Libraries

Mastering the console

x256 for converting RGB values to closest xterm-256 color code
term-mouse for mouse handling
keypress for input handling
string-width to determine visual string lengths

Discovering the map data

vector-tile for VectorTile parsing
pbf for Protobuf decoding
mbtiles for MBTiles parsing

Juggling the vectors and numbers

earcut for polygon triangulation
rbush for 2D spatial indexing of geo and label data
breseham for line point calculations
simplify-js for polyline simplifications

Handling the flow

bluebird for all the asynchronous Promise magic
node-fetch for HTTP requests
userhome to determine where to persist downloaded tiles

TODOs

MapSCII
- GeoJSON support via geojson-vt
- CLI support
  - startup parameters
    - TileSource
    - Style
    - center position
    - zoom
    - demo mode?
- mouse control
  - hover POIs/labels
  - hover maybe even polygons/-lines?
  - zoom into mouse pos
Styler
- respect zoom based style ranges
Renderer
- download and process tiles in a different thread (#3)
- optimize renderer for large areas (#6)
- label drawing
  - multi line label?
TileSource
- implement single vector-tile handling

Special thanks

lukasmartinelli & manuelroth for all their work on OSM2VectorTiles (global vector tiles from OSM Planet)
mourner for all his work on mindblowing GIS algorithms (like the used earcut, rbush, simplify-js, ..)

Licenses

Map data

The Open Data Commons Open Database License (oDbl)

OpenStreetMap is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF).

You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities.

The cartography in our map tiles, and our documentation, are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC BY-SA).

MapSCII

The MIT License (MIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

ImLoaD/mapscii