hpjansson/chafa
📺🗿 Terminal graphics for the 21st century. observed · 2026-08-28
Health v2 · maintenance only
88/100
- Activity 98
- Release rhythm 69
- Longevity 100
How is this computed?
round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-03. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.
- gap_med: 67.0
- age_days: 3053
- days_rel: 126
- days_push: 12
- n_releases_24m: 9
Adoption not part of the score
5176 stars · 117 forks observed · 2026-08-28
What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded
Chafa is a command-line utility and C library that converts images, including animated GIFs, into terminal graphics formats (Sixel, Kitty, iTerm2) or ANSI/Unicode character art. It works across a wide range of terminals from historical teleprinters to modern emulators, with SIMD-optimized, multithreaded rendering.
Use cases
- view images in the terminal
- convert images to ascii art
- display animated gifs in a terminal emulator
- render sixel graphics from the command line
- preview images over ssh in a terminal
- generate unicode character art from pictures
- embed image rendering in a terminal application via C API
When to choose
- you need to view or convert images directly in a terminal, including over SSH
- you need broad terminal compatibility, from legacy to modern graphics protocols
- you want a stable, documented C API for terminal image rendering
- you need fast, high-quality output with truecolor, transparency, and animation support
When to avoid
- you need a full graphical image viewer with zoom and editing
- you work exclusively in GUI environments with no terminal workflow
- you need pixel-perfect image display rather than an approximation
Facets
cli-tool · maturity active
image-processing graphics cli gui graphics developer-tools media windows cross-platform cli cpp terminal-graphics ansi-art sixel kitty-graphics-protocol iterm2 unicode-art image-viewer c-library animated-gif command-line linux macos
3 sources
- readme: https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa · fetched 2026-08-28 · 442a8e21e6c8
- homepage: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/ · fetched 2026-08-29 · 157462e1d76c
- site_page: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/ref · fetched 2026-08-29 · 6cd07e8f776e
Member repositories
| Repository | Role | Health v2 |
|---|---|---|
| hpjansson/chafa | main | 88 |
For agents
Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem