MapSCII – World map in terminal

218 pointsposted 5 months ago
by _august
(github.com)

24 Comments

kstrauser

5 months ago

Unrelated comment on the GitHub username: that was the name of my favorite dish at one of my favorite restaurants. Said diner had a charmingly stoner atmosphere: https://honeypot.net/2008/02/09/you-want-how.html

(To this day, in my house we call garlic bread “6BR”, as in, “hey Dad, could you pass the 6BR?”)

aftbit

5 months ago

Neat! I noticed it seems to crash when I open telnet in a fullscreen terminal (alacritty on 2560x1440), but if I make terminal half-width, it works. I didn't realize you could pass mouse control over telnet - need to read some code now! Good hack.

justusthane

5 months ago

Mouse movement is signaled in the terminal via ANSI escape sequences, which are just in-band character sequences which your terminal is smart enough not to display, so Telnet itself doesn’t actually have anything to do with it. As far as Telnet knows, they aren’t different from any other characters.

JdeBP

5 months ago

There are some oddities in the telnet version, such as it conflating XTerm and PuTTY, and it presenting a bizarre timeout message when presented with a blank TERM environment variable. I wouldn't be surprised if it somehow thinks that NVTs cannot have more than 256 columns.

Alas, that's the part that has no source available. (The TELNET server class library has published source, buried in a hyperlink in a comment to a closed issue from 2019, but the actual program built to use that library has not.)

JdeBP

5 months ago

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388589

It has been over 4 years and the redirect is still there. That bet would have been lost. (-:

dang

5 months ago

Thanks! Previous threads macroexpanded:

Telnet Mapscii.me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572328 - July 2025 (1 comment)

MapSCII – A Braille and ASCII world map renderer for the console - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975887 - April 2024 (23 comments)

MapSCII – The Whole World in Your Console - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27042629 - May 2021 (43 comments)

MapSCII: World map renderer for your console - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375881 - July 2019 (24 comments)

MapSCII – Braille and ASCII map renderer for the console - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14254165 - May 2017 (65 comments)

rastapasta

5 months ago

Won't go offline before me going offlife ;)

Panzerschrek

5 months ago

Looks very nice!

But for me it works properly only in a terminal emulator, proper GNU/Linux terminal (Ctrl+Shift+F1) can't display most of used symbols, it supports only ASCII.

veddox

5 months ago

Very cool! I expected this would be quite a rudimentary map, but it actually uses OpenStreetMap, so you can zoom right in to the street level.

tweakimp

5 months ago

I thought this was about Starcraft

ktpsns

5 months ago

Oh man, me too. SCII = StarCraft 2, and "maps" was such a typical term in StarCraft. I loved it. Had a great time with it, 20 years ago.

reaperducer

5 months ago

It's great that this can be accessed via Telnet, instead of SSH, which opens it up to the machines that need it most: Vintage computers that can't do SSH.

My personal server delivers content via HTTP/S, or Telnet, so this will be a good way to display maps for people who connect via Telnet.

junon

5 months ago

C-base! Still need to get over there sometime to check it out.

meken

5 months ago

I play a daily game called FoodGuessr, where you guess the country that some kind of food came from

Would be fun to use this with that - thanks!

dgrin91

5 months ago

Very cool and already 8+ years old

ddawson

5 months ago

Bonkers. This is a lot of fun.

theflyestpilot

5 months ago

Wonder if it would make gps possible/useful on a Watchy

denis_dolya

5 months ago

The only thing I can say when I saw it is — WOW!