TheaTTYr: a terminal theater for playing VT100 art and animations

TheaTTYr is a terminal theater for playing VT100 art and animations.

The VT100, introduced by DEC in 1978, was among the first video terminals to support ANSI escape codes.

The ANSI art scene used the VT100’s animation capabilities, made possible by codes that allowed cursor movement, deletion, and character updates to create animated effects.

Usually, they represent a long hand-crafted process done by a single person to tell a story. Some of these files may date back to the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Orhun Parmaksız developed this tool over a series of livestreams, which you can check out here.

You can see demonstrations and code on GitHub.