Creating ASCII art for your terminal isn’t new. Displaying animating ASCII GIFs in the CLI (command line interface), however, hasn’t been possible, or at least, not easy to do -- until now.

Shortly after Tenor was acquired by Google, I had an idea.

Many developers configure static

to appear when opening a terminal, but I imagined that ASCII art could animate like a GIF, and could easily be created from any GIF on Tenor.

After some tinkering, GIF for CLI was born.

Just in time for the

, GIF for CLI is available today on

. GIF for CLI takes in a GIF, short video, or a query to the

and converts it to animated ASCII art. This means each time you log on to your programming workstation, your GIF is there to greet you in ASCII form. Animation and color support are performed using ANSI escape sequences.

A typical MIDI setup might consist of a digital piano keyboard which can send messages relaying information such as pitch, velocity (how loudly or softly a note is played), vibrato, volume, panning, modulation, and more to a sound synthesizer which converts that into audible sound. The keyboard could also send its signals to desktop music scoring software or a digital audio workstation (DAW) which could then convert the signals into written notation, save them as a sound file, and more.

MIDI is a fairly versatile protocol, too. In addition to playing and recording music, it has become a standard protocol in stage and theater applications, as well, where it is often used to relay cue information or control lighting equipment.

Throughout this article, I’ll link to the work-in-progress Ellie versions, though I developed the sequencer locally. And while CSS can be written entirely in Elm, I’ve written this project in PostCSS. This requires a little bit of configuration to the Elm Reactor for local development in order to have styles loaded. For the sake of brevity, I won’t touch on styles in this article, but the Ellie links include all minified CSS styles.

Elm is a self-contained ecosystem that includes:

• Elm Make
  For compiling your Elm code. While Webpack is still popular for productionizing Elm projects alongside other assets, it's not required. In this project, I've opted to exclude Webpack, and rely on

Let’s do a quick recap of generators (read our primer on generators here). Generator functions return generator objects when invoked. A generator object has a next method, which returns the next element in the sequence. The next method returns objects with a { value, done } shape.

The following example shows an infinite fibonacci number generator. We then instantiate a generator object and read the first eight values in the sequence.

function* fibonacci() { let previous = 0 let current = 1 while (true) { yield current const next = current + previous previous = current current = next } } const g = fibonacci()