Access Maps from the Command Line Rendered in ASCII with Mapscii

Access Maps from the Command Line Rendered in ASCII with Mapscii

Have you ever wished you could access a mapping application from the command line? Now you can with Mapscii, which is sort of like Google Maps or Apple Maps but for the Terminal, with all of the mapping data rendered in ASCII text and characters. MapSCII uses OpenStreetMap data and the entire Earth can be navigated through the command line seamlessly rendered in ASCII. Beyond just being interesting and a kind of fun proof of concept to access mapping data from the command line in a console map rendered in ASCII, MapSCII is also Braille compatible which is obviously valuable for many users in and of itself (and certainly more useful than ). OK enough talk, you probably want to try this out yourself (well, if youre a geek like me anyway).

This is demonstrated on a Mac with Terminal app but because youre telnetting into a remote server you can also access MapSCII from any other terminal application, whether its on Mac OS X, Linux, unix, or Windows with an app like PuTTY or the Windows 10 linux bash shell. MapSCII can be navigated by the keyboard or mouse, keyboard navigation is easy with the following keys: You can also click and hold and drag on the map with your mouse cursor. Whether or not you find this fun, interesting, geeky, useful or useless, is up to you. Most users will be perfectly happy using Google Maps on the web or iPhone, or the Apple Maps app on their Mac, iPhone, or iPad, but even then its still fun to be able to access a full fledged mapping application from the command line. Lets see if embedding this works: The MapSCII project is open source and you can also install it locally if youd like, check the project out . If you liked this youll almost enjoy , so take a look.