📺🗿 Terminal graphics for the 21st century.
Chafa is a command-line utility that converts image data, including
animated GIFs, into graphics formats or ANSI/Unicode character art suitable
for display in a terminal. It has broad feature support, allowing it to be
used on devices ranging from historical teleprinters to modern terminal
emulators and everything in between.
The core functionality is provided by a C library with a public,
well-documented API.
Both library and frontend tools are covered by the Lesser GPL license,
version 3 or later (LGPLv3+).
For the most up-to-date information, please see https://hpjansson.org/chafa/
Chafa is available as packages for many software distributions. A few are
listed below, along with their command-line installation instructions:
Arch Linux … pacman -S chafa
Brew … brew install chafa
Debian … apt install chafa
Fedora … dnf install chafa
FreeBSD … pkg install chafa
Gentoo … emerge media-gfx/chafa
Guix … guix install chafa
Kali Linux … apt install chafa
MacPorts … port install chafa
OpenBSD … pkg_add chafa
openSUSE … zypper in chafa
Ubuntu … apt install chafa
On Windows, Chafa can be installed via Scoop and Winget:
Scoop … scoop install chafa
Winget … winget install hpjansson.Chafa
See https://hpjansson.org/chafa/download/ for more.
You will need GCC, make and the GLib development package installed to
compile Chafa from a release tarball. If you want to build the
command-line tool chafa and not just the library, you will
additionally need the ImageMagick development packages.
Prebuilt documentation is included in the release tarball, and you do not
need gtk-doc unless you want to make changes/rebuild it.
After unpacking, cd to the toplevel directory and issue the following
shell commands:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
You will need GCC, make, Autoconf, Automake, Libtool and the GLib
development package installed to compile Chafa from its git repository. If
you want to build the command-line tool chafa and not just the library,
you will additionally need development packages for:
If you want to build documentation, you will also need gtk-doc.
Start by cloning the repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa.git
Then cd to the toplevel directory and issue the following shell commands:
$ ./autogen.sh
$ make
$ sudo make install
Erica Ferrua Edwardsdóttir maintains excellent Python bindings for Chafa. If
Python’s your thing, check them out. They are easy to use and come with a
detailed tutorial: