Tinpot #

A high-performance pure Dart engine for converting images to ANSI terminal text using structural symbols, inspired by Chafa.

Tinpot is designed to integrate seamlessly with Dart CLI applications (like those built with termui), allowing you to render rich, colorful images directly into your terminal. By utilizing structural block symbols (such as , ▀, ▄, █) and accurate DIN99d color space evaluation, it creates a fast, surprisingly high-fidelity approximation of images for standard TTY environments.

Features #

• High-Performance: Operates directly on contiguous bit-packed color arrays, unrolled loops, and bitwise arithmetic to process pixels quickly.
• WASM-Compatible Output: Generates clean, predictable ANSI blocks mapping perfectly to classic chafa terminal output (focusing on strict standard block symbols).
• Exact Mean Color Selection: Ensures mathematically accurate foreground/background representations using Euclidean distance checks within the perceptual DIN99d color space.
• Terminal Scale Compensation: Internally handles mapping a 1:1 image aspect ratio to the classic 1:2 height distortion of physical terminal cells.

Example #

import 'dart:io';
import 'package:image/image.dart' as img;
import 'package:termui_tinpot/termui_tinpot.dart';

void main() {
  final image = img.decodeImage(File('image.png').readAsBytesSync())!;

  // Converts image to a 2D array of terminal cells (60 columns, auto-scaled rows)
  final engine = TermuiTinpot();
  final grid = engine.convert(image, 60, (60 / (image.width / image.height) / 2).floor());

  // Use Termui or iterate manually to emit standard ANSI color codes
  // ...
}