ASCII Cursor

Features

• Background photo of a ruined cyberpunk street, darkened with a token-driven scrim and vignette, drifting in a slow Lissajous pan with a gentle zoom breath; the glyph grid re-samples the moving photo so every glyph stays on the light beneath it
• A full monospaced glyph grid (16px cells, Geist Mono 400) sampled once from the photo: dense glyphs over bright, saturated light, sparse ones over dim areas and nothing in the dark
• Each glyph is tinted by the image colour beneath it, slightly lighter than its surroundings, through one source-in composite of a cell-resolution tint map
• Resting presence is very faint (about 5 to 9% on the brightest regions) with a slow ambient shimmer of a few cells
• Cursor movement lights a square, grid-snapped footprint that widens with speed: glyphs move to the dense end of the ramp, gain opacity and decode briefly
• Lit cells fade back with framerate-independent exponential decay (gradual, about 2–3s), scrambling slower as they cool; emission comes only from movement
• Fills the viewport (100dvh) at every width
• At 560px and narrower the view sits 1.15× closer on the city and the cursor trail is off, leaving only the drifting background
• Neon flicker: every 2.4–5.5s one tube runs a real failure pattern (stutter, dropout and restrike, or buzz). Its exact pixels are masked out of the photo, so the tube itself goes dark with its glow halo, and comes back with a brief restrike overshoot; its glyphs fade with it. Tubes are picked by per-cell peak neon score above the street, so reflections and the amber sky never start one
• Glyph rain: faint | : . streaks fall one cell at a time, tinted by the city colour beneath, so they show most over lit areas
• Click glitch: a 380ms burst of jumping horizontal slices with a red/cyan channel split over the whole field (desktop only)
• Click sends a seismic sphere: a crisp ring of glyphs races out from the click (900px/s), jolting outward and scrambling, with nothing lingering behind; 3–5 faint fault lines rip through the ASCII after it: glyphs on a crack drop out and the torn edges flicker, scramble and shift about 2px, then everything fades back in place (1.5s); underneath, the field gives a small decaying shake (4px, slight roll) and a neon tube is knocked into a flicker. Touch drags light the grid on larger touch screens; when the pointer rests the grid stays calm (the idle scanner is off by default)
• Glyph atlas, DPR capped at 2, paused offscreen and in hidden tabs, static frame with no loop under prefers-reduced-motion

Accessibility

Decorative layers

The image wrapper and the canvas carry aria-hidden="true"; the image has an empty alt

Landmark

<main> labelled by a single caption heading

Contrast

The caption sits on the darkest scrim band at 4.5:1 or better in both themes

Focus indicators

Global :focus-visible outline with --ring

Reduced motion

prefers-reduced-motion: reduce draws one static frame with no loop

Customise it with AI

Open ASCII Cursor in Atheros AI Builder, pick a design system and ask the AI assistant to change the layout, copy or behaviour — the animation is regenerated against your tokens. Take the HTML, CSS, JS and React source with you, or pull it into your repo from Claude Code, Cursor or Codex over MCP.