cURL Art

This is a playful and unusual way to view the artwork from my Daily Generative Art project using cURL, a command-line program for reading data over the internet. The output of cURL Art is a cross between pixel and ASCII art, using the colors available to the particular terminal you run the command from.

Terminal primer

If you’re comfortable with running command-line code, you can skip this section.

cURL is a program that runs on the command-line. If you’re on macOS, you can use Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) or your terminal app of choice. On another OS you may need to install cURL before you can continue.

If you’ve never used a terminal app before: Don’t worry, it’s very simple. Nothing on this page is unsafe to run. When you first open your terminal you’ll probably see something similar to:

Last login: Wed Feb 13 16:41:42 on ttys000
Users-Computer:~ user$ |

From here, you’ll type out a command and then press return/enter. When you see a $ at the beginning of an example, that just means that the terminal prompt is ready for you to enter a command. You won’t type the $ yourself.

Last login: Wed Feb 13 16:41:42 on ttys000
Users-Computer:~ user$ |

Usage

The simplest command is:

$ curl "samiare.net/daily/190128"

This will find the image for that entry, 028_ 190128, and render it in text in your terminal with the default settings. You can replace 190128 with any date (in the form YYMMDD) for which an art piece has been posted.

Options

There are four options that can be appended to the URL to influence the output: width, height, colors and dither.

width/height: These options act as caps on the maximum width and/or height of the image. Whichever results in the smaller image will be used.
```
$ curl "samiare.net/daily/190128?width=20"
```
colors: Different terminals support different numbers of colors, most commonly either 256-, 8- or 1-color(s). The corresponding values for these options are 256, 8 and bw (for 1). Depending on your terminal, 256 and/or 8 may not work.
```
$ curl "samiare.net/daily/190128?colors=bw"
```
dither: This option determines which characters are used to draw the image. none will use only background colors, producing the most “pixel-art”-like output. block and shade use different Unicode characters to add a few levels of “shading”.
```
$ curl "samiare.net/daily/190128?dither=shade"
```

Multiple options can be chained together. The first option is always preceded by a question mark (?), and each subsequent one with an ampersand (&).

$ curl "samiare.net/daily/190128?width=20&dither=shade&colors=bw"

Tips & common issues

While cURL is a general purpose program that could be given any URL, it will only produce this output when pointed at one of my generative art URLs. With any other URL you will likely get the HTML markup of that page returned to you.
In many terminal apps you can press the up↑ and down↓ arrow keys on your keyboard to cycle between previous commands you’ve entered, so you don’t have to type everything out again.
The quotation marks (") around the URL are required if you’re using more than one option. If you forget them, the program will run but never return control to you. On macOS you can type Control+C, or just close the Terminal window to exit.
If it seems like the options you’re using are not working, check to make sure that you have an ampersand (&) between them and not a question mark (?).

There is also a help url, if you want a reminder of the options and usage:

$ curl "samiare.net/daily/help"