cliizdat

A cli-native ANSI and ASCII text editor inspired by ACiDDraw, its Unix successor DurDraw, and the rich tradition of concrete poetry in the Eastern Bloc samizdat.

cliizdat is a keyboard-only, cell-grid glyph editor for Unicode block art — octants (U+1CD00–1CDE5), Symbols for Legacy Computing, and Nerd Font glyphs — the material that ncurses editors silently drop because wcwidth() returns −1.

Editing is replace-only: there is no insert mode, so columns never drift and the grid physically cannot break. Keys just do things — no modes to toggle.

Features

• Modeless, keyboard-only editing on a fixed cell grid
• Per-cell 256-color, stored as sparse git-diffable .color sidecars
• Layers with a JSON manifest, knockout halos, solo view
• Rectangular selection: fill, repaint, copy / cut / paste
• Loadable glyph palettes (octants auto-sorted by pixel density)
• .ans export (fg-only, terminal background is the paper)
• .dur import — bring existing durdraw art in, colors and all
• Width authority is go-runewidth, never libc wcwidth

Build

Requires Go 1.25+.

go build -o ~/bin/cliizdat .

Usage

cliizdat project.json          # a manifest project
cliizdat layer.txt             # a single layer (implicit project)
cliizdat art.dur               # import durdraw art
cliizdat -p palette.txt file   # attach a glyph palette

Press h in the editor for the full control list.

key	action
arrows	move cursor
Shift+arrows / s	select (s: anchor, arrows grow, Esc drops)
1–9	stamp slot (fills the selection)
0 / x	erase (slot 0 is always the eraser)
y d p	copy · cut · paste
c / C / r	color picker · eyedropper · repaint
Tab	glyph palette → slot
[ ] / v	prev/next layer · solo
u / U	undo · redo
R	resize canvas (crop / extend)
g	go to row,col
w / e	save · export .ans
q	quit

File model

project.json      collage manifest (the single source of assembly)
layers/
  sigils.txt      layer = plain UTF-8 text, LF, space = transparent
  sigils.color    sparse per-cell color overrides: ROW COL FG, 1-based

Coordinates are 1-based everywhere in the UI, manifest, and sidecars. Saving strips trailing spaces, enforces LF, and sorts sidecars by row,col.