Marching Ants

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Marching Ants Mean?

Marching ants is a slang term for an animation effect first used in the MacPaint program designed by Bill Atkinson in 1984. By today’s standards, it is a rather simple animation program that simulates motion on a screen. It is most commonly seen as a moving border of dots around a selected item.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Marching Ants

The marching ants effect happens when programmers create visual lines that can move from one area to the other. The common example of marching ants is the selection box in various paint and graphic design utilities, where the borderline of the box is set up to consist of moving dots or lines. Marching ants can be implemented in many ways, for example, with a frame-by-frame GIF, or a source code command to incrementally shift a series of colored pixels. It is commonly used in image and visual design tools.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.