REXPaint

There are a number of ASCII art editors available on the web, but most suffer from poor usability or small feature sets (one notable exception being eigenbom's awesome fork of ASCII Paint). For development of my own projects (see X@COM), I needed an application equipped with a wide range of tools for quickly drawing and manipulating ASCII art, as well as the ability to easily browse the images created as stored in their native format. Thus REXPaint was born.

Hopefully it will also find use as a general purpose ASCII art editor. I'd love to see what people can create with this program, so send me a link/copy if you've made something cool!

At launch the major features of this editor include:

• Edit characters, foreground, and background colors separately
• Draw shapes and text
• Copy/cut/paste areas
• Undo/redo changes
• Preview effects simply by hovering the cursor over the canvas
• Palette manipulation
• Image-wide color tweaking and palette swaps
• True-color RGB/HSV color picker
• Create multi-layered images
• Zooming: Scale an image by changing font size on the fly
• Browse art assets and begin editing at the press of a button
• Images highly compressed
• Export PNGs for use in other programs or on the web
• Skinnable interface

(Check out the features page for some screenshots.)

I say features "at launch" because REXPaint can still be considered a work in progress and will continue to receive updates as necessary. Some features on the to-do list that went unimplemented since I don't really need them yet and I don't know how much demand there would be: lasso selection for copying, image-wide glyph swapping akin to the color swap feature, tool tips on mouse hover, layer color blending, type to search/filter through browseable assets.