MapSCII - The Whole World In Your Console.

A TypeScript-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

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 Bun or Deno 2, 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

• x256 for converting RGB values to closest xterm-256 color code
• term-mouse for mouse handling
• keypress for input handling
• string-width to determine visual string lengths

Discovering the map data

• vector-tile for VectorTile parsing
• pbf for Protobuf decoding
• mbtiles for MBTiles parsing

Juggling the vectors and numbers

• earcut for polygon triangulation
• rbush for 2D spatial indexing of geo and label data
• bresenham for line point calculations
• simplify-js for polyline simplifications

Handling the flow

• node-fetch for HTTP requests
• env-paths to determine where to persist downloaded tiles

TODOs

• MapSCII

  • GeoJSON support via geojson-vt

  • CLI support

    • [-] startup parameters
      • TileSource
      • Style
      • center position
      • zoom
      • demo mode?

  • mouse control

    • hover POIs/labels
    • hover maybe even polygons/-lines?

• Styler

  • respect zoom based style ranges

• Renderer

  • download and process tiles in a different thread (#3)
  • optimize renderer for large areas (#6)
  • label drawing
    • multi line label?

• 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).

MapSCII

• License
• Authors