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)

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.

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