The term "IRC Art" is used to refer to text based visual art found on IRC. The art found on IRC has evolved past using just ASCII charcters. IRC clients today understand a number of special formatting characters. These characters allow IRC software to send and receive colors and formatting codes such as bold, italics, underline and others. This allows more possibilites now for creating ASCII/ANSI art for IRC. While it is possible to have support for 99 or even 256 colors, most art made for IRC follows the 16 color standard.
In order to properly execute playing art in an IRC channel, it is generally agreed that you want to pump the art as quickly as possible. That means, any client or server side throttling can make pumping large art heavily delayed or interrepted. You also want to make sure you have full support for viewing UTF-8 unicode characters.
Execute the following commands:
echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf
echo "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" > /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
Place the following lines in your ~/.bashrc file:
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
Now just run source ~/.bashrc to make the changes take affect.
IRSSI
/set term_charset utf-8
/set recode_autodetect_utf8 ON
/set recode_fallback ISO-8859-15
/set recode_out_default_charset ISO-8859-15
/set recode_transliterate ON
/set recode ON
/set cmd_queue_speed 0msec
/set cmds_max_at_once 0
/network add -cmdmax 0 -cmdspeed 0msec <network_name>
WeeChat
UTF-8 is enabled by default on Weechat.
/set irc.server_default.anti_flood_prio_high 0
/set irc.server_default.anti_flood_prio_low 0
/set irc.server.<network_name>.anti_flood_prio_high 0
/set irc.server.<network_name>.anti_flood_prio_low 0
Note: Change 0 to 2 for safe flood rates on networks like EFNet.
| Pack | Description |
|---|---|
| ASCII Art Farts | Big collection of shitty ASCII only art |
| Unicode Art | Small collection of nice looking unicode art |
| Pack | Description |
|---|---|
| Blocktronics | Archive of ANSI art from blocktronics |
| SixteenColors | Archive of ANSI art from sixteencolors |
Note: These will not work on IRC unless they are converted into IRC art! (see Tools/Convert)
| Pack | Description |
|---|---|
| IRCArt | Massive collection of organized IRC art |
| MiRCART | Art pack made by the MiRCART crew |
| PP4L | Art pack made by the PP4L crew |
| TrollASCII | Giant mess of unorganized art |
| Volatile | Art pack containing other packs & some OC by volatile |
Note: The IRCArt repository listed above contains all the art from the other packs, has been heavily organized, and is constantly being updated with new art.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| a2m | Convert ANSI art to IRC art |
| p2u | Convert images to ANSI/IRC art |
| irc2ansi | Convert IRC art to ANSI art for your terminal |
| irc2html | Convert IRC art to HTML |
| img2term | Output images in your terminal |
| RuinIRC99 | Convert images to IRC art from your browser |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| ACiDDraw | Old school ANSI art drawing tool |
| asciipumper | MS-Paint style program to draw IRC art (archived) |
| IRC-Paint | MS-Paint style program to draw IRC art (archived) |
| PabloDraw | Old school ANSI art drawing tool |
| Roar | Editor & Tools |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| ASC_Paint | Draw ANSI art from your browser |
| asciiblaster | Draw IRC/ANSI art from your browser |
| asciimaker | Draw IRC art from your browser |
| ansiedit | Network-enabled web based ANSi art application |
| bashfill | Draw art for your terminal |
| FSymbols Draw | Draw unicode block art in your browser |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| UniColExport | Unicode block-character graphic exporter for GIMP |
| Limnoria ASCII Plugins | ASCII plugins for Limnoria |
| MiRCARTools | IRC art editor & tools |
| Scroll | Very functional IRC bot to play art & more |
| TDFiglet | Convert text to TheDraw ANSI fonts |
| Channel | Network |
|---|---|
| ##ascii | Freenode |
| #ascii | EFNet |
| #mircart | EFNet |
| #scroll | SuperNETs |