ASCII Turtle

21 Dec, 2025

Scrolling through a group chat, people were discussing early coding experiences on hardware back in the day.

It brought to mind some early memories in the elementary school computer lab—before we got hooked up with Oregon Trail—when we used Logo to draw shapes on a computer with a friendly turtle.

So, I built ASCII Turtle, a terminal version of those old Logo turtle graphics.

It's simple: give the turtle commands (forward 20, right 90) and it draws with Unicode box-drawing characters. Pure Python, zero dependencies, ~200 lines of code.

The sticky wicket was handling terminal font proportions. Characters are roughly 2x tall as they are wide, so you need fd 30 horizontally but only fd15 vertically to draw a square.

Try it: git clone https://github.com/miguelito4/ascii-turtle.git && cd ascii-turtle && ./ascii_turtle.py

_

Previous Next