Simon Willison’s Weblog

Rich Pixels. Neat Python library by Darren Burns adding pixel image support to the Rich terminal library, using tricks to render an image using full or half-height colored blocks.

Here's the key trick - it renders Unicode ▄ (U+2584, "lower half block") characters after setting a foreground and background color for the two pixels it needs to display.

I got GPT-5 to vibe code up a show_image.py terminal command which resizes the provided image to fit the width and height of the current terminal and displays it using Rich Pixels. That script is here, you can run it with uv like this:

uv run https://tools.simonwillison.net/python/show_image.py \
  image.jpg

Here's what I got when I ran it against my V&A East Storehouse photo from this post:

# 2nd September 2025, 11:05 am / ascii-art, cli, python, ai, generative-ai, llms, uv, vibe-coding, gpt-5, rich

Monodraw for macOS (via) Spectacular OS X application for drawing ASCII art diagrams—it’s basically OmniGraffle for ASCII art. The output is beautiful, and it even lets you do things like draw connecting arrows between boxes and then re-arrange the boxes such that the arrows keep up with your changes.

# 18th November 2017, 6:58 pm / ascii-art

Mandelbrot set in PostgreSQL. Surprisingly short SQL statement that produces an ASCII art Mandelbrot set.

# 13th August 2009, 2:23 pm / ascii-art, fractals, mandelbrot, postgresql, sql

SQL pie chart. Generating ASCII art pie charts using the world’s scariest MySQL SELECT statement.

# 13th August 2009, 1:04 pm / ascii-art, graphing, mysql, sql