ascii.rest Offers 202 Free Animated ASCII Pieces for Web Pages, With No Dependencies

A project ascii.rest offers 202 animated ASCII art pieces that web developers can drop into their pages. ASCII art means pictures drawn with text characters. The pieces work with React, Next.js, Astro, or a single HTML tag, and they are free to use and change under the MIT license.

Each piece is a small, typed TypeScript module with no dependencies. That means it does not pull in other libraries to work. The collection includes 15 full-colour scenes, loaders, charts, text effects, 27 programming language logos, 23 Linux distro logos, and 3D shapes, physics demos and creatures.

The simplest way to use it needs no install and no build step. A developer adds one script tag pointing to ascii.rest, then places an <ascii-art> tag on the page with the name of a piece, such as piece="donut". The ascii.js script defines that tag and loads the piece from ascii.rest.

The animation plays only while it is on screen. For people who prefer reduced motion, it holds the first frame instead of animating.

The piece is a client component, so it works in the Next.js app router as it is. If you pass the name with piece="donut", the piece is fetched only when it mounts, meaning when it first appears on the page.

The scenes cover places and moments such as an alpine dawn, an aurora over a fjord, a deep reef, Earthrise over the moon, Kyoto at dusk, Mumbai's Marine Drive at night, the Taj Mahal at sunrise, a rainy Tokyo side street and the dusk aarti at the Varanasi ghats. Two of them, Lantern Lake and Tokyo Rain, are marked as new.

There are also pieces for everyday interface work. These include a boot log, a progress bar, spinners, a skeleton loading card, a terminal session, a digital clock and a block-letter 404 page.

The data section has a bar chart, candlesticks, CPU meters, an equalizer, a gauge, a heartbeat trace, a heatmap, a radar, a sparkline and an uptime bar. The type section has effects such as a typewriter, a scramble, a split-flap board, a marquee, glitch text and Morse code.

Logos come in colour or one ink (mono). Language logos include C, Go, Python, Rust, TypeScript and Zig. Eight company logos are listed, including Apple, Cloudflare, Vercel and PlayStation, all marked as new. The distro logos range from Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu to Arch, NixOS and Tux, and the page has a link to request a logo.

The rest of the collection covers 3D shapes like a donut, a DNA helix and a tesseract, space scenes, physics demos such as a double pendulum and Newton's cradle, nature scenes, creatures, objects, generative patterns and effects like matrix rain and fireworks.