ASCII Art Gallery

Last reviewed on April 27, 2026.

A short, practical gallery of small ASCII pieces that fit common roles in scripts and documents — borders, dividers, prompt glyphs, status icons, and arrow sets. Click any tile to copy it. Each piece is plain printable characters; nothing depends on a special font.

Dividers

Use a divider to separate sections in a script's output, a CI log, or a README. Pick one and stick with it across the whole document — switching dividers reads as inconsistency.

Borders and frames

Borders work well around a single short line — a heading, a status, a result. They get heavy fast, so do not nest them.

Prompt and bullet glyphs

One-character prompts that read as "input awaited" or "list item" without using a real shell character. Useful when you want a stream overlay to look terminal-like without showing a real shell.

Status icons

Square or angular icons sized to match a single line of text. The aim is recognizability at a glance, not detail.

Arrows

Arrow sets in printable-only and Unicode forms. Use the printable-only set in places that strip non-ASCII characters (some CI runners, some loggers, some legacy terminals).

How to use these in real places

The same piece works differently depending on the destination. A single rule of thumb covers most of it: match the surrounding line width. Dividers wider than the rest of the output break the visual rhythm; narrower dividers look forgotten. Standard widths to default to:

• 40 columns — narrow log lines, mobile-friendly READMEs.
• 60 columns — most blog snippets and inline code in documents.
• 80 columns — the historical terminal width and what most CI dashboards still wrap to.

For pieces that need a specific width, pad them yourself with the same character. The pieces in this gallery use 40 and 60 columns; multiply or trim as needed.

Things that go wrong

• Proportional fonts. Pasting any of these into a chat client that uses a proportional font collapses the alignment. They only work in monospace.
• Trailing spaces. Frames that depend on space-padding break when an editor strips trailing whitespace on save. Use a non-space pad character (a dot, a dash) if your editor is aggressive.
• Mixed widths. A 60-column divider followed by a 40-column block looks worse than no divider at all. Pick a width and use it consistently.
• Unicode in restrictive places. The arrows section includes Unicode glyphs that look better but render as boxes in some environments. The printable-only set is the safe default.

Pairs with other tools on this site

To add a banner above any of these dividers, generate one in the ASCII banner generator. To draw a closed box around a paragraph rather than a single line, use the box-drawing tool. For a corrupted or glitched variant, run the piece through the glitch text generator at a low chaos setting.