Aewan is a curses-based program that allows for the creation and editing
of ASCII art. The user is able to move the cursor around the screen
by means of the arrow keys and "paint" characters by pressing the
corresponding keys. There are dialog boxes that allow the user to choose
foreground and background colors, as well as bold and blink attributes.
The user may also select rectangular areas of the canvas in order to
move, copy, and paste them. Aewan also supports "intelligent" horizontal
and vertical flipping (e.g., it converts "\" to "/", etc). What sets
Aewan apart from similar projects is the fact that it can work with
multiple layers and has the ability to turn transparency and visibility
on and off for each layer. A layer dialog is provided through which
the user can change the order of the layers. Thus, each layer can be
edited independently in order to generate a composite drawing. Instead
of using the layers for compositing, it is also possible to use the
layers as frames for an animation, thus enabling the user to create
ASCII animations. The file format is easy to parse, so it is easy to
write a terminal-based application that uses the Aewan files to display
onscreen. Aewan has been tested on the Linux terminal, rxvt, xterm, and
the FreeBSD console.
