ansi-art-thumbnailer

GNOME desktop thumbnailer for ANSI art files (*.ans, *.nfo).

Installation

1. Quit all Nautilus processes: nautilus -q
   • Even if you currently do not have any Nautilus windows open, you should run the command above!
2. Delete thumbnails folder: rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails
3. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/1j01/ansi-art-thumbnailer.git
4. Change directory: cd ansi-art-thumbnailer
5. Run make install: sudo make install
   • Warning: this will run PIP as root.
   • The script uses PIP to install necessary python packages. If you do not have system-wide pip installation, please setup it first with sudo apt install python3-pip.

From now on, the thumbnails should be visible.

Uninstallation

1. Run make uninstall: sudo make uninstall
2. Quit file managers and delete cached thumbnails folder, as during installation.

Troubleshooting

Thumbnails do no show up on some Ubuntu-based distributions 18.04 and later

Most likely it is a problem with bubblewrap (1, 2, and many more threads online). The short workaround fix (NOT recommended) would be to install a bwrap wrapper in /usr/local/bin:

sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/bwrap https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NicolasBernaerts/ubuntu-scripts/master/nautilus/bwrap
sudo chmod +rx /usr/local/bin/bwrap

Instead, consider updating to the latest version of Ubuntu, where this issue is already fixed.

ANSI art is not rendered properly

The script currently assumes UTF-8 encoding, which is uncommon for ANSI art files.

TODO: detect encoding

Credits

Based on mrc-em-gnome-thumbnailer, particularly the Makefile was useful! But also the overall repository structure.

Uses Stransi to parse ANSI escape sequences, and Pillow to render the text.

License

MIT

See also

• ansilove - ANSI art to PNG converter. This would probably be a better thumbnailer, as it supports more formats, and fonts! There's also a library version, but that's probably not needed for using it as a thumbnailer.
• Textual Paint - ANSI art editor TUI inspired by MS Paint