chafa.py 1.0.0

Python bindings for Chafa. Visualize images with text in python.

The snakes don't bite! (I think...)

Docs | Tutorial | Examples

What is this?

Chafa is a wonderful command-line utility, created by Hans Petter Jansson, for visualizing images in the terminal. In Jansson's own words:

The future is (still) now!

The premier UX of the 21st century just got a little better: With chafa, you can now view very, very reasonable approximations of pictures and animations in the comfort of your favorite terminal emulator. The power of ANSI X3.64 compels you!

chafa.py is a python wrapper for the chafa library so you can use rad graphics in your (undoubtedly pretty cool) Python applications!

chafa.py tries to be very pythonian (I think that's a word) in the sense that most getter and setter functions are simply made to be attributes of Python objects.

How do I get it?

First, you will need to install chafa <https://hpjansson.org/chafa/download/>_. This should be fairly straight forward since chafa packages are available for most linux distributions.

.. currentmodule:: chafa.loader

If you want to use the included :py:class:Loader class to load images for using with chafa.py, you will also need the MagickWand <https://imagemagick.org/script/magick-wand.php>_ C-library.

From PyPi

Chafa.py is available on PyPi. You can install it by running

pip install chafa.py

From source

If you want, you can install and play around with this package by cloning the repo and building it yourself

python -m build

in the root of the repository. This will build a distribution file in a new folder: dist/ called something like chafa-[version].gz. You can then install this file with pip by running

pip install ./dist/chafa-[version].tar.gz

Dependencies

• Chafa
• MagickWand
• Hatchling (for building)
• Python 3.5 or later

Example

Here is the example program from the Chafa C API docs written in chafa.py. Take a look at the examples page in the docs for more cool examples, including how to load your images from files.

from chafa import *
from array import array

PIX_WIDTH  = 3
PIX_HEIGHT = 3
N_CHANNELS = 4

# Initiate pixels array ('B') for 8 bit values
pixels = array("B", [
    0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff,
    0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff,
    0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff
])

# Specify which symbols we want
symbol_map = SymbolMap()
symbol_map.add_by_tags(SymbolTags.CHAFA_SYMBOL_TAG_ALL)

# Set up a configuration with the symbols and the canvas size in characters
config = CanvasConfig()

config.width  = 23
config.height = 12

config.set_symbol_map(symbol_map)

# Create the canvas
canvas = Canvas(config)

# Draw pixels and build string
canvas.draw_all_pixels(
    PixelType.CHAFA_PIXEL_RGBA8_UNASSOCIATED,
    pixels,
    PIX_WIDTH,
    PIX_HEIGHT,
    N_CHANNELS * PIX_WIDTH
)

output = canvas.print().decode()

print(output)