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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I made a simple ASCII-art analog clock in Emacs

Just a toy, showing how easy it is to leverage built-in Emacs features (most notably Artist mode, which provides a set of functions for creating ASCII-art vector graphics) and things like trigonometric functions and timers to create something nice. A short blog post mentioning some background (and showing a screenshot): https://mbork.pl/2025-09-08_Emacs_Artist_clock#.

This is a simple ASCII-art analog clock built within Emacs that demonstrates how to combine built-in Emacs features like Artist mode with trigonometric functions and timers. It is intended for Emacs users interested in… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Rhei is a dynamic installation, an animated sculpture, an idea expressed in the form of a minimalistic, digital clock.

    2015 · hellorhei.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    ASCII art on your wall ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    2016 · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.

    2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hello all! Build clean, minimalistic analog clock webpage to Cloudflare Pages. This is for (maybe): - kids to learn - for second monitor - old tabled on shelf - .. Themes and screen wake lock buttons with auto-hide. Goal is to keep it as clean as possible. This possible makes no sense, but for a domain of $10/y this is cheap site for me to keep and see how it lives on.

    Feb 2026 · clocksimulator.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I've made an ASCII drawing board. You can set any brush, canvas size, export art as a text file. I want to keep it as manual/analog as possible, hence there is no tool for converting image to ASCII. Prompting LLMs to draw ASCII art turned out to be a difficult task . So instead I decided to ask it make a drawing board. Wihtout coding agent I wouldn't even try myself. Although it is an interesting task, it would drift me away. Basically it's just a drawing board with endless variations of textures and brushes: when you make large canvas and zoom out you don't see ASCII anymore, but…

    2025 · delopsu.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Artwork created using keyboard symbols and characters

    2021 · user.xmission.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7IB

    Originally started as a project to restore patterns from now defunct website 808.pixll.de just for myself, but eventually i decided to share it with others. I've seen this website mentioned a couple of times on HN:) Currently it only supports Roland TR-808, but there will be more.

    2025 · drumpatterns.onether.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8CP

    2012 · dchang.mit.edu · its alternatives →

  9. 9IM

    I made a website for drawing ascii art with other people https://ascii-collab.app/ It's been online for a little over a year so there's a fair bit of stuff to browse if you want to look around (so much that I even made a poster https://ascii-collab.app/poster.png) There are other websites like yourworldoftext that do this but ascii-collab has some extra features like per-user undo/redo, box selection, a color highlight mode to see who made particular changes, and there's admin tools so I can remove spam. The code is open sourced here…

    2021 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    JS/ReactJS simulation of A Million Times

    2017 · clocks.80limit.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Elegant timepiece screensaver for macOS

    2025 · bauhausclock.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Rhei▲282

    Electro-mechanical clock with a liquid display

    2015 · hellorhei.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Make ASCII art for READMEs, Discord & creative visuals

    Sep 2026 · imagetoascii.art · its alternatives →

  15. 15AA
  16. 16

    Surprise your readers with an original post using text art

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    This tool turns videos into ASCII pixel art. You can use your webcam feed or upload a video, then use the controls to adjust the colors, resolution, text style, etc. Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/ascii It's built with javascript / html canvas. I'll be continuing to work on this, with the goal of improving performance (it can be laggy at high resolutions) and to also allow image input (turn an image into animated ASCII art). Please let me know of any feedback or suggestions!

    2024 · collidingscopes.github.io · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A cozy fireplace for emacs. Contribute to johanvts/emacs-fireplace development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19DT

    2019 · dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20AA

    ASCII AUTOMATA is a tool to analyze the visual connectivity of characters in textmode fonts. It works by scoring edge connectivity of each piece and finding the best matching neighbour piece. Every time it places a piece, it "grows" towards the edges it touches by placing a matching piece. The red heatmap shows how frequently each character is used, useful for analyzing the fonts. I initially made it as a tool for myself. When I design textmode art fonts it is sometimes difficult to figure out if a specific character would actually be useful for drawing or not. I wanted a tool which would…

    2025 · hlnet.neocities.org · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I made a little emacs minor mode for connecting assembly code and assembled code buffers I'm really fascinated by the idea of demystifying an operating system, so to be able to view the alignment between code and data I find really satisfying

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22TM
  23. 23SC

    2014 · s3.amazonaws.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Nice-looking lightweight ASCII line charts generator for iOS

    2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →