MapSCII - The Whole World In Your Console.

MapSCII is a node.js based Vector Tile to Braille renderer for xterm-compatible terminals.

• Discover the globe or zoom in to explore your neighbourhood
• See Point-of-Interest around any given location
• Highly customizable layer styling with Mapbox Styles
• Compatible with Linux and OSX terminals, Windows support via PuTTY
• Connect to any vector tile server - or just use my custom OpenStreetMap based one
• Work offline and discover local VectorTile/MBTiles
• 100% pure Coffee-/JavaScript! 😎

How to install

If you haven't already got Node.js >= version 4, 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

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 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

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 based label and mouse collision detection
• breseham for line calculations
• sphericalmercator for EPSG:3857 <> WGS84 conversions
• tilebelt for some slippy map tilename calculations

Handling the flow

• bluebird for all the asynchronous Promise magic
• request-promise for promisified HTTP request handling
• userhome to determine where to persist downloaded tiles

TODOs

• MapSCII

  • CLI support
    • global linking for npm install -g
    • startup parameters
      • TileSource
        • VectorTile
        • MBTile
        • Tileserver
      • Style
      • center position
      • POI filter?
  • Viewport
    • start with zoom level which shows full
      • world
      • vector tile
    • boundary based on current zoom & size
    • determain tiles to show
    • zoom while keeping center
    • calculate tile areas
    • center based on mercator
    • handle console resize
  • mapscii-server
    • telnet
    • ssh
  • handle console resize
  • mouse control
    • accurate mouse drag&drop with instant update
    • hover POIs/labels
    • hover maybe even polygons/-lines?
    • get hover lat/lng
    • zoom into mouse pos
  • API
    • setCenter
    • setZoom

• Styler

  • compile filters to function chains
  • support constants
  • respect minzoom

• Renderer

  • position tiles accordingly

  • line drawing

    • support for stroke width
    • support for dashed/dotted lines?

  • feature selection for priority rerendering (roads -> warter -> roads:bridges)

  • label drawing

    • support for point labels
    • dynamic decluttering of labels
    • centering text labels
    • clipping fix when x<0 after repositioning
    • multi line label
    • label margin to avoid POI overlap?
    • translatable raster fonts

  • filled polygons

    • convert polygons to triangles
    • use triangulation for filling
    • respect fill/line style file based setting

• Tile

  • directly throw away features that aren't covered by any style
  • TileSource class (abstracting URL, mbtiles, single vector tile source)
  • tile request system
    • from single vector-tile
    • from local mbtiles
    • from remote url
      • permanent caching of received files

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Michael Straßburger

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.