Textmode Art Software

lvllvl is a browser editor for character-based art. It covers PETSCII and a long list of other machines' character sets, with layers, animation frames, custom tilesets and palettes, and it can generate frames from an uploaded image or video. Projects save to the browser, to GitHub or to Google Drive.

ASCIIFlow is a browser scratchpad for drawing boxes, arrows and labels in plain ASCII, for diagrams that have to live inside a comment or a text file. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign into.

Marq's PETSCII Editor is where most Commodore 64 character art gets drawn. It runs in a browser or on the desktop, covers animation and several C64 screen modes, and exports the data in the forms a real C64 program expects.

Moebius is an ANSI art editor from the Blocktronics scene, with collaborative editing, character palettes and 16-color and iCE color modes.

Monodraw is a Mac editor for pictures made of text: box diagrams, flowcharts, trees and layout sketches that can be pasted straight into source code, a commit message or a README. It draws with real tools - shapes, lines, arrows, text boxes - rather than by typing characters into a grid.

PabloDraw edits and views ANSI and ASCII art and supports several people drawing the same piece at once over the network.

Petmate edits PETSCII images with the C64 character set and colors, and exports to formats the real machine can load.

Playscii edits and animates ASCII art with arbitrary character sets, converts images to text art, and has a mode for building simple games.

REXPaint edits ASCII art with layers, custom fonts and an XP format that many roguelike engines can load directly.

TEXTREME 2 is a text editor that treats typing as a performance: every keystroke throws characters around, shakes the screen and makes a noise. It is a toy rather than a tool, and a reliable way to make a writing session look ridiculous.