Comment by carra
2 hours ago
It's weird to see this called "ANSI art". Is that an American thing? I don't think I've ever heard that in Europe, everybody calls it ASCII art.
2 hours ago
It's weird to see this called "ANSI art". Is that an American thing? I don't think I've ever heard that in Europe, everybody calls it ASCII art.
That was my initial thought too on seeing the title, having never heard the term before. So I decided to look it up and it turns out there is a whole separate genre called “ANSI art” based on a different tech stack and a naming mistake from history:
- ASCII is a real ANSI standard, the 7-bit character set that we all know and love
- Microsoft, IBM and others extended this to many different 8-bit sets, each with its own “extended” characters in the 128-255 range, often including both graphic symbols and control codes
- one of the more popular ones, windows-1252, became informally known as ANSI because Microsoft hoped that this (and others) would become new ANSI standards (they didn’t)
- people on BBSes and then early websites used this encoding standard to create art using graphic symbols and colour codes that are not available in ASCII art
- due to the optimistic, but ultimately incorrect, naming of both charset and the supporting library, this became known as ANSI art
American here, but I've always known these to be distinctly different. ANSI art uses the full 256 character set (and mostly the extended, block-like characters), and 16 colors, whereas ascii art doesn't have the extended characters and colors. There was a thriving ANSI art scene in the 90s in the era of BBSs.
If you have not seen it, the definitive ansi (and ascii) art archive, 16colors, is great https://16colo.rs/
Or try your hand with this online ansi art editor https://ansidraw.com/
These are definitely ANSI art. They use the unique PC extended character set (pipes, shaded blocks, etc), the classic PC CGA/EGA 16-color palette, and ANSI escape codes.
I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.
I got into the distinction a little bit in Part 2 of this series: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco...
It’s a technicality - they call it ASCII art in the US even though it includes both non-ASCII characters (IBM extensions) and ANSI.SY’s escape sequences to change colors.