mapscii

MapSCII renders a world map directly inside your terminal window, using Braille and ASCII characters to draw geography at surprisingly fine detail. You can scroll around, zoom in and out, and explore points of interest, all without leaving the command line. The quickest way to try it is to connect via telnet to a public server the project maintains, with no installation required.

Map data comes from OpenStreetMap, the community-maintained open map of the world. MapSCII fetches vector tiles, which are compact geographic data files, and converts them into characters your terminal can display. It supports Mapbox style files for visual customization, and it can connect to any public or private tile server, not just the default one. You can also run it offline if you have local tile files in a supported format.

Controls are designed around the keyboard: arrow keys pan the map, and two letter keys zoom in and out. If your terminal supports mouse events, you can also drag the map and use the scroll wheel to zoom, which makes navigation feel more natural. A toggle switches between Braille and block character rendering modes.

Installing it locally takes one command with npm or snap on Linux, or npx to run it without installing. It requires Node.js version 10 or later. On Windows, the telnet-to-public-server approach is the easiest path since the project recommends a third-party telnet client for Windows users.

The project is written entirely in JavaScript and is open source. It uses several well-known geographic and terminal libraries under the hood to handle tile parsing, line drawing, spatial indexing, and color rendering. The map data from OpenStreetMap is licensed under the Open Database License, and the project notes that you must credit OpenStreetMap if you use or redistribute the data.