aewan: For the Klimt of the console

I’ve seen about three or four ASCII art editors for the console now, and it’s becoming clear that each one has unique features that are very appealing, but misses out on something another one offers.

After I found cavewall, I figured any other ASCII art editor was going to fall flat. After all, cavewall had a slew of features that I hadn’t thought possible in text-art program, and didn’t expect to see again.

And along came aewan.

The ASCII Editor Without A Name actually includes layer management, much like you’d see in GIMP or That Other Graphics Program which shall go unnamed and unlinked. The one that starts with “foto” and ends with “shoppe.”

If you’re skeptical, so was I, but aewan pulls it off quite gracefully. And those layers are the key to copy and pasting, moving blocks of images, creating stamp pad effects and even transparent stamping. It’s amazing.

You can add dozens of layers to text drawings, set their visibility, name them and rearrange them. Set their dimensions and move them around until you complete your masterpiece.

aewan has hotkeys for the color palette, a menu-driven interface with key commands for some of the most important features, and can save all your work into a file that (supposedly; I didn’t try it) can be used in a pager to display animation effects.

Wow. 😯 That’s impressive for a program that saw its last update in 2005. My hat is off. Again. For that alone, an incredibly rare and immeasurably valuable K.Mandla gold star is warranted: ⭐ Well done.

But … I can see where some features from cavewall don’t appear in aewan. cavewall has adjustable stepping features for example, making line drawing and the like more convenient. aewan doesn’t have that, or if it does, I don’t recall seeing it.

aewan does have a specific line-drawing mode though, and that’s quite handy. Pressing the hyphen or pipe symbol actually draws the appropriate extended line, so you can draw in continuous bars, instead of just the text character. But vertical lines aren’t as easy with aewan as they are with cavewall.

And neither aewan nor cavewall has the polygon drawing and editing features that were in textdraw. But that’s only black-and-white, and so loses an edge to cadubi, which behaved more like a colorized stamping program that could import images rendered by caca, and edit them.

So I’m at the point now where each of these has a particular feature that makes it shine, but misses out on something mastered by its brethren. Perhaps at some point a Grand Unifying Text-Based Art Tool will appear. And it shall be known as GUTBAT, and the people shall rejoice. … 🙄