Jitesh117

Jitesh117 / subwayCLI

Public

endless subway surfers gameplay rendered right in your terminal

15
1
100% credibility
Found May 30, 2026 at 15 stars -- GitGems finds repos before they trend. Get early access to the next one.
Sign Up Free
AI Analysis
Go
AI Summary

SubwayCLI is a fun, harmless program that converts videos into animated ASCII art and plays them in your terminal window. It comes with a built-in game video demo, or you can feed it any video from your computer. The program uses your terminal's size automatically and can display the art in color or black and white. It's a novelty toy for people who enjoy retro aesthetics or want to show off a quirky visual trick.

How It Works

1
🎮 You discover a fun terminal trick

Someone shows you a video playing as colorful ASCII art right in their command window, and you want to try it too.

2
📦 You get the tools ready

You install two free programs that let your computer understand videos and run this kind of program.

3
🚀 You run it for the first time

With one simple command, a built-in game video starts playing as animated ASCII art in your terminal window.

4
You make it your own
🎬
Stick with the demo

The built-in game video plays in a loop forever, mesmerizing to watch.

📁
Try your own video

Point it to any video on your computer and watch it transform into ASCII art.

5
🎛️ You adjust how it looks

You can change how many frames play each second and how big the picture appears on your screen.

🎉 You have your own ASCII theater

Your terminal becomes a tiny movie theater, playing videos as animated text art that fills your whole screen.

Sign up to see the full architecture

4 more

Sign Up Free

Star Growth

See how this repo grew from 15 to 15 stars Sign Up Free
Repurpose This Repo

Repurpose is a Pro feature

Generate ready-to-use prompts for X threads, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, YouTube scripts, and more -- with full repo context baked in.

Unlock Repurpose
AI-Generated Review

What is subwayCLI?

subwayCLI is a terminal-based ASCII video player written in Go that renders video frames as colored or monochrome character art directly in your terminal. Drop in any video file and it plays back as pixelated characters, complete with color support using ANSI escape codes. The project ships with an embedded Subway Surfers gameplay clip as a demo, so it works out of the box without needing your own video file. It uses ffmpeg under the hood to decode video frames, then converts RGB pixels to ASCII characters using luminance-based mapping. The player loops forever, resizes automatically to your terminal dimensions, and supports custom frame rates via the `-fps` flag.

Why is it gaining traction?

This hits a sweet spot between novelty and utility. Developers have been rendering ASCII art in terminals for decades, but subwayCLI adds polish with true color support, automatic terminal detection, and a dead-simple CLI interface. The embedded demo video means you can run it immediately without hunting for a video file. The cross-platform Makefile that builds binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows is a nice touch for sharing with teammates. It is the kind of project that gets shared in Slack channels and terminal-focused communities because it is visually impressive and takes seconds to try.

Who should use this?

Terminal enthusiasts who want to show off their setup, developers building CLI tools who need a video playback demo, or anyone who appreciates the aesthetic of ASCII art. It is also useful as a lightweight video preview tool when you are SSH'd into a server without a GUI. If you want to embed video playback in a terminal application, this provides a reference implementation using ffmpeg and Go.

Verdict

subwayCLI is a fun, functional project with a clear purpose and clean execution, but at 15 stars it is early-stage and unproven at scale. The 1.0% credibility score reflects that this is a one-person hobby project with minimal community validation. Test coverage is not visible, and documentation is sparse beyond the README. Worth trying for novelty or as a learning reference, but do not bet a production workflow on it until it accumulates more usage and maintenance activity.

Sign up to read the full AI review Sign Up Free

Similar repos coming soon.