inkling (WebAssembly)

Reveal ASCII art as a progress indicator, in the browser. The same pure Rust core as the inkling crate, compiled to WebAssembly with wasm-bindgen.

The browser has no terminal, so this exposes the engine's model rather than a renderer: parse art, choose an ordering, and read back the per-cell reveal ranks. Your JavaScript draws each frame however it likes, which is exactly how the native renderers work.

npm install inkling-wasm

import init, { Reveal } from "inkling-wasm";

await init();
const reveal = new Reveal(art, "geodesic"); // or "auto", "top", "left", ...
const glyphs = reveal.glyphs();             // width*height chars, row-major
const ranks = reveal.ranks();               // Float32Array, -1 for background

// a cell is visible exactly when its rank is in 0..=progress
function frame(progress) {
  let out = "";
  for (let i = 0; i < ranks.length; i++) {
    out += ranks[i] >= 0 && ranks[i] <= progress ? glyphs[i] : " ";
    if ((i + 1) % reveal.width() === 0) out += "\n";
  }
  return out;
}

Building

cargo install wasm-pack
wasm-pack build --target web    # emits pkg/ with inkling.js + inkling_bg.wasm

Then import the module from pkg/, or use the published npm package.

The inkling family

This is the browser (WebAssembly) build. The same engine ships five ways:

• inkling-wasm on npm (this package), the WebAssembly build for the browser.
• inkling-loader on crates.io, the Rust library. cargo add inkling-loader.
• inkling-cli, the inkling command, to drive a reveal from any language through a pipe.
• inkling-loader on PyPI, the Python package. pip install inkling-loader.
• inkling-loader on npm, the Node addon. npm install inkling-loader.

Built from the inkling Rust core. License: MIT.