ASCII Desktop

Before all the flash of modern interface designs, most computer work relied handling various lines of code. Art also got born from old editing styles, and a suitable example in this regard is ASCII Desktop. It comes in a lightweight package, and enhances the desktop by turning everything into ASCII art.

A good thing about it is that it saves you the effort required to go through a setup process. As such, it’s easy to carry around on a thumb drive to apply this enhancement to other computers. Don’t worry about the health status of the target PC, because registry entries are not modified in the process.

The application’s core function is to turn everything on the desktop into ASCII art. This is instantly applied once the program is launched. Affected regions include shortcuts, files, and folders, active windows, as well as the background picture, with the taskbar remaining intact.

It’s possible to interact with your computer in a regular way. However, there’s little chance that you can actually use this enhancement on the long run, because font used in the design is pretty large, making elements close to impossible to identify.

Note that the application doesn’t create a taskbar entry, or tray area icon, and the only way to close it is from the Windows Task Manager. Luckily, this window is not affected, otherwise you would have remained stuck in a cool, but pretty useless environment. In case you just want to launch it for fun at some point, assigning a hotkey command to its shortcut makes it accessible regardless of your location.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that ASCII Desktop is a straightforward of experiencing ASCII art directly on the desktop. You can still interact with everything on it, but general design makes it close to impossible to tell elements apart.