px2ansi

A high-performance Rust port of px2ansi.

px2ansi converts pixel art images into ANSI escape codes for display in modern terminals. It uses 24-bit truecolor and unicode half-block characters (▀ / ▄) to render images with precision.

It is significantly faster than the original Python implementation and ships as a single, static binary.

Features

• 🚀 Fast: Written in Rust, optimized for speed (~25x faster than Python).
• 🎨 Truecolor: Supports full 24-bit RGB colors.
• 🧩 Transparency: Correctly handles alpha channels (rendering transparent pixels as terminal background).
• 📦 Simple: Single binary, no dependencies required at runtime.

Installation

From Source

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/px2ansi-rs
cd px2ansi-rs
cargo install --path .

crates.io

cargo install px2ansi-rs

Usage

CLI

Convert an image and print to stdout:

px2ansi path/to/image.png

Save output to a file:

px2ansi image.png -o art.txt

Try it out!

You can test it right now with the included test.png (a small pixel art example):

px2ansi tests/test.png