I just stumbled upon an interesting utility. The World map in the Terminal! Yes, It is so cool. Say hello to **MapSCII** , a Braille and ASCII world map renderer for your xterm-compatible terminals. It supports GNU/Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. I thought it is a just another project hosted on GitHub. But I was wrong! It is really impressive what they did there. We can use our mouse pointer to drag and zoom in and out a location anywhere in the world map. The other notable features are;
* Discover Point-of-Interests around any given location
* Highly customizable layer styling with [Mapbox Styles][1] support
* Connect to any public or private vector tile server
* Or just use the supplied and optimized [OSM2VectorTiles][2] based one
* Work offline and discover local [VectorTile][3]/[MBTiles][4]
* Compatible with most Linux and OSX terminals
* Highly optimizied algorithms for a smooth experience
### Displaying the World Map in your Terminal using MapSCII
To open the map, just run the following command from your Terminal:
```
telnet mapscii.me
```
Here is the World map from my Terminal.
[![][5]][6]
Cool, yeah?
To switch to Braille view, press **c**.
[![][5]][7]
Type **c** again to switch back to the previous format **.**
To scroll around the map, use arrow keys **up** , **down** , **left** , **right**. To zoom in/out a location, use **a** and **z** keys. Also, you can use the scroll wheel of your mouse to zoom in or out. To quit the map, press **q**.
Like I already said, don't think it is a simple project. Click on any location on the map and press **" a"** to zoom in.
Here are some the sample screenshots after I zoomed it.
[![][5]][8]
I can be able to zoom to view the states in my country (India).
[![][5]][9]
And the districts in a state (Tamilnadu):
[![][5]][10]
Even the [Taluks][11] and the towns in a district:
[![][5]][12]
And, the place where I completed my schooling:
[![][5]][13]
Even though it is just a smallest town, MapSCII displayed it accurately. MapSCII uses [**OpenStreetMap**][14] to collect the data.
### Install MapSCII locally
Liked it? Great! You can host it on your own system.
Make sure you have installed Node.js on your system. If not, refer the following link.
