# About asciicn

> Who makes asciicn, why it exists, and how the ASCII engine, components and agent skill are built and licensed.

asciicn is an open-source ASCII art engine for React and shadcn/ui, with components, animated scenes and an agent skill that teaches your coding agent to use it. Leo builds and maintains it, and it's published by OpenCore, the GitHub organization behind Social SDK, Email SDK and other open-source TypeScript tools.

## What asciicn is

An engine and what it draws. `ascii-core` installs into `lib/ascii` as plain source: charsets, palettes, cell metrics, a Canvas2D glyph grid and the tone-to-glyph mapping. `ascii-shader` adds a WebGL2 renderer that turns a GLSL field into real glyphs from a glyph atlas, with colour modes, pointer interaction and CRT effects. `ascii-export` writes any frame as text, ANSI, SVG or PNG, and records WebM.

On top of the engine sit about 80 shadcn registry components (backgrounds, charts, interface pieces, text effects, image and video converters), 12 animated scenes, and the [ASCII Studio](https://asciicn.dev/studio) for tuning a look and exporting it. The agent skill is a SKILL.md with references that teaches Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents how to build new effects on the same engine.

Nothing runs on our servers once it's installed. Every file lands in your repo, so you can read it, change it and ship it like the rest of your code.

## Why it exists

ASCII art draws an image with characters: a dense glyph where the picture is dark, a sparse one where it is light. Terminals, BBS screens and home computers made it a craft, with its own character sets such as CP437 and PETSCII. Most ASCII effects on the web today are one-off canvases that blur on high-density screens, ignore reduced motion and can't be themed.

asciicn puts one engine under every effect, so a scene, a chart and a loading state share the same glyph cells, colours and motion rules, and every glyph snaps to whole device pixels. Because the skill teaches the engine rather than a fixed list of components, your agent can build an effect nobody has made yet instead of copying the closest example.

## License

asciicn is free and MIT licensed. The source lives at [github.com/opencoredev/asciicn](https://github.com/opencoredev/asciicn).

Last updated 2026-10-27. Canonical page: https://asciicn.dev/about