ANSI art guide
Colorful terminal text without surprises.
ANSI art uses escape sequences to color or style text in terminals. It is excellent for command-line interfaces, but it should be used thoughtfully because not every destination understands ANSI codes.
What ANSI adds
Plain ASCII controls shape. ANSI controls presentation. A banner can be cyan, green, amber, or red without changing the visible characters. This is useful for status output, build summaries, interactive scripts, and terminal demos where color improves scanning speed.
Where ANSI works well
- Local shells and terminal emulators
- CLI onboarding screens
- Demo scripts and internal tooling
- Logs meant for humans rather than parsers
Where to avoid ANSI
Disable ANSI when copying to GitHub Markdown, most CMS editors, plain email, or documentation pages. Escape codes can appear as raw text when the target does not support terminal control sequences.
Readable color choices
| Color theme | Best use | Design note |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal Cyan | Informational headings and neutral prompts. | Good default because it stands out without implying danger. |
| Matrix Green | Success states, demos, and retro terminal effects. | Use for short output so the theme stays readable. |
| Amber CRT | Caution, waiting states, and nostalgic interfaces. | Works best when paired with plain text labels. |
| Red Alert | Errors, failed checks, and warnings. | Reserve it for states that genuinely need attention. |
Plain text fallback strategy
A practical ANSI workflow is to create two versions: one colored terminal version and one plain text version. The colored version works well in a shell, while the plain version can be pasted into documentation, support tickets, or changelogs. This prevents escape sequences from becoming visual clutter in places that do not interpret them.
Operational use cases
ANSI banners are useful when a human is watching a command run: deployment starts, migrations finish, a local development server is ready, or a script needs to distinguish warnings from success messages. For machine-readable logs, keep the output simple and avoid decorative color.
Choose a short status
Examples include ready, complete, warning, failed, syncing, and migration done.
Add color for hierarchy
Use color to separate status types, not to decorate every line.
Copy a plain backup
Keep a no-ANSI version for docs, tickets, and places that show escape codes literally.
Open AsciiGlyph and toggle “Include ANSI escape codes” depending on where you plan to paste the result.