bad.el boxing after dark

This is the home of bad.el, boxing after dark, which is an Emacs Lisp graphics program for GNU Emacs. It comes with a drawing program, the studio, plus ascii games and interactive demos. bad.el requires zero installation nor any further configuration of Emacs to try, instead it uses the local "queued" (`-Q') Emacs from scripts that come with the software.

Source:
files · bad.tar.gz
read on for bad-2

Do send a: mail

the studio, drawing program

The bad.el studio is a drawing program for GNU Emacs.

control alpha, draw mock GUIs

bad.el runs on top of Emacs but doesn't look like it.

image: SDXL

import ascii art, rotate

Imported ascii drawings, building a shelf and a table. The shelf, not accidentally so.

import images, show parts

This is the `defun' of my life.

image: SDXL

program: bad-studio

The studio running in a no-graphics terminal, showing how the poor man's transparency works in mysterious ways.

At the opposite end: running in kitty, that only runs in X.

ascii art, ansi colors

Ascii art produced with the bad.el interactive editor that still has many features yet to be implemented.

demo 2: bad-draw-here

A minimal demo of bad.el. Draw ascii art in and from Lisp, insert the result in a buffer.

demo 3: bad-egypt

This isn't just another demo.

ascii pyramid: __20h__
gradient: color.el by Drew Adams & Julien Danjou

ascii game 1: bad-toronto

An animated ascii game with a puzzle to be solved. The skyline of Toronto in a new version of an old work.

original ascii art: jgs

ascii game 2: bad-snake

The coolness of software lies very much in the eye of the badholder. Here the familiar snake game, looking unfamiliar.

ascii art: josuah

demo 4: bad-grad

It is known that in ancient Egypt, they used 3D geometry and algebra building the pyramids. But could they also have used computing, even programming?

demo 5: bad-maple

Inspired by the 1985 game Déjà Vu.

image: Dalle

TODO

If you'd like to contribute to bad.el, there are many areas where it can be improved.

• Performance.
  Instead of just drawing everything and see what comes up on top, one could have a more clever algorithm where everyone first expressed their interests - I would like to draw this, here, etc - however after all that the algorithm would compute the big picture and just draw the minimum necessary to produce the final output. This will be, possibly, much faster. For example, it wouldn't draw a box positioned underneath another (opaque) box, as that would be overwritten anyway.
  Old news! But I'm sure it can run much faster still; see this.
• Studio interface.
  - many basic features are not implemented
  - mouse support is at a proof-of-concept level
  - the interface relies on cycling and randomizing
  - it isn't integrated with Emacs idioms, e.g. `C-u'

requirements

bad.el -

• requires GNU Emacs 29 or later
• is tested on Debian GNU/Linux and OpenBSD
• works well in xterm, fbterm, and kitty

links

• a thread on emacs-devel
• Richard Stallman is kind enough to ask questions (RMS, who did ascii animations with `animate-birthday-present', and also wrote the `image-' stuff that bad.el uses for images)
• we made the news
• the supportive #emacs people at Libera.Chat
• the first attempt at a web page for bad.el
• more ascii art from jgs
• the bitreich gophers community
• more programming from incal
• and last but not least our host

resources

Here are a bunch of resources from other Emacs projects as I stumble upon them or people tell me about them - new items are appended, so it isn't sorted other than that.

I'm happy to integrate awesome features and neat modules into bad.el.
neat means one is able to call a function, be it a `defun' or `cl-defmethod', and something interesting immediately happens - this is by far the best way. The second best way is: one is able to call a function, then useful and/or interesting data is returned for further inspection 😄

• ColorPalette
• palette.el
• hexrgb.el
• FaceMenuPlus
• facemenu+.el
• DoReMi
• eyedropper.el
• misc-cmds.el
• Mastering Emacs by Mickey Peterson

bad-2: speed kills

Actually, the cubes are 2 cubes à 6*6*6 red, green, and blue colors, but here I made them two chars on the horizontal side as the font is monospace, but not square (doing that, on the other hand, made them square as the font is 16x8 pixels - so lucky). A square font would be interesting for bad.el. Note the awesomeness of `cl-loop'.

I'm currently working on a minimal [1] version of bad-el. This version already runs much faster thanks to more cognitive algorithms for drawing. But this isn't yet a release. I have other ideas before it skyrockets. For everything that does not involve images it is super-fast; for small resolutions, 640x480 or 720x480, it is super-fast even with images; for a 1280x720 screen resolution, a 158x44 char terminal emulator window, and a 1024x1024 png, the response time for drawing the whole thing is 0.09s (9 cs = 90 ms, or 11.1 FPS, so good it isn't a FPS...). This is for byte-compiled, but not natively compiled Elisp.

bad hand notes

[1] Minimal? software not longer than
8 files * 256 lines/file =
2**3 files * 2**(2**3) lines/file =
2**(3 + 2**3) = 2**(3 + 8) = 2**11 =
2048 lines

Thanks for reading this far! See you around 😄
updated: 2025-01-11
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