I rewrote my ASCII banner tool into a full rendering engine (Bangen v2) 🚀
Hey folks 👋 A while back I released a small terminal tool called Bangen — it was basically a clean wrapper around pyfiglet for generating ASCII banners. It worked. It was neat. But honestly… it was limited. So I went all in and rewrote it from scratch.
⚡ What it is now
Bangen v2 is no longer just a banner generator — it’s a modular ASCII rendering engine + design tool. Think:
- gradients
- animations
- effects pipeline
- TUI editor
- export system All inside your terminal.
🔥 What’s new (highlights)
🎨 TrueColor Gradient Engine
- Per-character RGB gradients
- Multi-stop support (not just 2 colors)
- Horizontal + vertical modes
⚡ Effect Pipeline
You can chain effects like:
- wave
- glitch
- pulse
- typewriter
- scroll
bangen "HELLO" --effect wave --effect pulse
🧠 Interactive TUI (this is my favorite)
Replaced the old prompt-based UX with a split-screen editor:
- Left → controls (text, font, gradient, effects)
- Right → live preview Feels like a mini IDE for ASCII art.
🧬 CLI Mode (fully scriptable)
bangen "HELLO" --font slant --gradient "#ff00ff:#00ffff"
Works great in pipelines too.
🧩 Presets
Save styles and reuse them:
bangen --preset neon_wave "HELLO"
🔥 Export Engine
You’re not stuck in the terminal anymore:
- TXT
- HTML
- PNG
- GIF (animated 👀)
🤖 Prompt → Banner (experimental)
bangen "HELLO" --ai "cyberpunk neon hacker vibe"
Auto picks styles/effects.
🏗 Architecture (for devs)
I also restructured everything into a proper modular system:
- rendering engine
- gradients system
- effect pipeline
- TUI layer
- CLI layer
- export system No more single-file script chaos.
💡 Why I built this
Most ASCII tools feel like: > "generate once, done" I wanted something that feels like: > "design + render + animate + export"
🚀 Try it
git clone https://github.com/programmersd21/bangen.git
cd bangen
pip install -e .
bangen
Feedback
I’d love brutal feedback — especially from people who:
- use terminal tools heavily
- build TUIs
- care about CLI UX What would make this actually useful for you?
If this gets traction, next step is:
- plugin system (custom effects/gradients)
- better animation engine
- maybe GPU-like ASCII shaders Appreciate any thoughts 🙏
u/Klutzy_Bird_7802 — 7 hours ago
