One cell at a time

ANSI art tools: TheDraw then, Moebius and PabloDraw now

Every BBS login screen and file_id.diz of the 90s was drawn in an editor, character cell by character cell. The classic tool was TheDraw on MS-DOS; today the medium is alive with Moebius and PabloDraw, and this page is the honest map — what ANSI art is is explained next door, and the captures here are the real thing from the era.

The editors

  • today's standard

    Moebius ↗

    From the Blocktronics art group — macOS, Windows and Linux, open source. The half-block brush (paint just the top or bottom half of a cell) is its signature; it also exports to PNG. Development lives on GitHub ↗.

  • the workhorse

    PabloDraw ↗

    Free, cross-platform (C#), handles ANSI, ASCII and RIPscrip vector art, views and edits — and supports multi-user collaborative drawing over a network, a feature BBS artists never had.

  • the classic, 1986–1993

    TheDraw ↗

    Ian E. Davis' shareware MS-DOS editor — the tool the 90s art scene actually drew with. Final public version 4.63 (1993); archived at WinWorldPC ↗ for the curious.

  • animation studio

    Durdraw ↗

    A modern Unix-world ANSI/ASCII/Unicode animation studio, openly inspired by TheDraw and ACiDDraw — where the medium goes when you want motion.

  • the converter

    AnsiLove ↗

    Turns .ans and friends into PNG — the bridge between the terminal world and the web, and how most ANSI art gets shared outside terminals today.

Why you can't just copy-paste it

ANSI art looks like a picture but is plain text: glyphs from code page 437 plus escape codes carrying the 16 colors. Paste it somewhere modern and the encoding scrambles the block characters and the colors vanish. Terminals with the right font at 9×16 cell proportions render it; everywhere else, use a viewer like PabloDraw or a converter like AnsiLove to get the PNG.

Where the art lives now

The largest public archive is Sixteen Colors ↗, preserving decades of art packs from groups like ACiD and iCE. For the medium in its natural habitat, the BBS captures here show real sessions from tHe sHacK bBS, 1998–2006.

Part of the sdelic.org rebuild · ANSI art, explained · BBS captures · the hub