MapSCII - The Whole World In Your Console. 
A node.js based Vector Tile to Braille and ASCII renderer for xterm-compatible terminals.
Try it out!
$ telnet mapscii.me
If you're on Windows, use the open source telnet client PuTTY to connect.
Features
- Use your mouse to drag and zoom in and out!
- Discover Point-of-Interests around any given location
- Highly customizable layer styling with Mapbox Styles support
- Connect to any public or private vector tile server
- Or just use the supplied and optimized OSM2VectorTiles based one
- Work offline and discover local VectorTile/MBTiles
- Compatible with most Linux and OSX terminals
- Highly optimized algorithms for a smooth experience
- 100% pure JavaScript! :sunglasses:
How to run it locally
With a modern node installation available, just start it with
npx mapscii
How to install it locally
With npm
If you haven't already got Node.js >= version 10, then go get it.
npm install -g mapscii
If you're on OSX, or get an error about file permissions, you may need to do sudo npm install -g mapscii
With snap
In any of the supported Linux distros:
sudo snap install mapscii
(This snap is maintained by @nathanhaines)
Running
This is pretty simple too.
mapscii
Keyboard shortcuts
- Arrows up, down, left, right to scroll around
- Press a or z to zoom in and out
- Press c to switch to block character mode
- Press q to quit
Mouse control
If your terminal supports mouse events you can drag the map and use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
Behind the scenes
Libraries
Mastering the console
x256for converting RGB values to closest xterm-256 color codeterm-mousefor mouse handlingkeypressfor input handlingstring-widthto determine visual string lengths
Discovering the map data
vector-tilefor VectorTile parsingpbffor Protobuf decodingmbtilesfor MBTiles parsing
Juggling the vectors and numbers
earcutfor polygon triangulationrbushfor 2D spatial indexing of geo and label databresenhamfor line point calculationssimplify-jsfor polyline simplifications
Handling the flow
node-fetchfor HTTP requestsenv-pathsto determine where to persist downloaded tiles
TODOs
-
MapSCII
-
GeoJSON support via geojson-vt
-
CLI support
- [-] startup parameters
- TileSource
- Style
- center position
- zoom
- demo mode?
- [-] startup parameters
-
mouse control
- hover POIs/labels
- hover maybe even polygons/-lines?
-
-
Styler
- respect zoom based style ranges
-
Renderer
-
TileSource
- implement single vector-tile handling
Special thanks
- lukasmartinelli & manuelroth for all their work on OSM2VectorTiles (global vector tiles from OSM Planet)
- mourner for all his work on mindblowing GIS algorithms (like the used earcut, rbush, simplify-js, ..)
Licenses
Map data
The Open Data Commons Open Database License (oDbl)
OpenStreetMap is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF).
You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities.
The cartography in our map tiles, and our documentation, are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC BY-SA).