These days internet data speeds of 16 Mbps are considered normal and you can download complete games from Steam or watch full movies on Netflix on such an internet connection. But when the internet was taking its baby steps, the download speeds were very very slow. You could not download movies and even images took a long time to load. In those days, people preferred text-based information – text files were pretty common and even the websites were mostly text in HTML without any animation or graphics.
People were creative and they figured out using various ASCII characters in text files to make them look cool. This is when ASCII art phenomenon was born. Some of the folks were such an expert in creating these ASCII art files, that everyone looked at them with a great deal of respect and a little bit of jealousy. If you want to create ASCII art files to have a taste of those older times, then you can use a freeware called Jane.
Jane is a free editor that helps you quickly edit and create new ASCII art text files. Jane is actually an acronym for Just another nasty editor but it’s not that nasty – it works pretty well. You can get either the installer package or the standalone version. Both of them allow drag-n-drop of the ASCII files on the Jane window to open them.
Jane allows you to edit the files, create new ASCII art files, insert special characters, change the viewing schemes and more. It integrates with Windows File Explorer so that you can just double-click on files to open them. But, as has been mentioned, it also supports drag-n-drop interface. In addition, you can enable the multiple instances option so that you can load many different files in different Jane windows. Jane has a built-in file browser and a list of recently opened files. For the keyboard junkies, it also comes with a long list of keyboard shortcuts that you can find in the help files.
You can download Jane ASCII editor from http://www.kifoth.de/jane/html/download.php.